Leadership Training
Learning isn’t limited to academic settings. Our Scholars also engage in monthly leadership workshops where they acquire new skills and connect with new friends. Workshop themes have included making good decisions, coping with gender-based violence, telling your own story, honing your confidence in public speaking, improving listening skills, becoming a team player, understanding personal development (sexual, psycho-social, emotional), exploring career options, and more. There’s always an energetic blend of reflection, games, dancing, and laughter, too!
These vignettes reveal how our Haitian Scholars cultivate leadership through volunteering:
Meet Christelle
Christelle Saurel was a Mercy Beyond Borders Scholar throughout high school in Gros Morne, Haiti. She is now on full scholarship at a university in Port-au-Prince, planning to become a diplomat! While in high school, she wrote this reflection on paying it forward:
“On my street, I always saw a girl who was studying. One day I decided to go out and meet her. I looked in her notebook and saw only poor grades. I decided to supervise her homework every day, beginning right at that moment.
“We did our homework together. I took care to explain everything. She told me that it was the first time in her life that someone was concerned about her. She said for the first time someone helped her with her homework. Her mom does not know how to read and write and her big brother has no time for helping her. I was very touched deeply into my heart. Now each day, I am taking some time to tutor her in her studies.”
Meet Lo-Ammie
Verty Lo-Ammie wrote this during Leadership Camp back in 2015 when she was in high school. At that time, she was an Mercy Beyond Borders Scholar. She still is! She received a full scholarship to university in Haiti from the Patricia Conlin Family Scholarship Fund at Mercy Beyond Borders.
“A girl came to live in my neighborhood because her mom did not have enough money to make them survive. Nobody wanted to talk to these strangers because they were very poor. Not even one girl wanted to be her friend. But I was opposed to such behavior. One day I went to her house and I found her sad and crying, I asked why she was crying and so she explained the problems that her family faced.
“I tried to encourage her. After all, we can be poor one day and later on rich. I, too, had tears in my eyes. Her sadness touched my heart. I accepted her as my friend. I braid her hair or paint her nails; I give her clothes and shoes and every day I share my food with her. We talk about everything!
“Now after these few years we are the best friends ever. We really love each other. She smiles a lot now because she knows she is not alone: we have each other.”
These Mercy Beyond Borders Scholars are volunteering at a reforestation project in Grepin, Haiti.
In South Sudan, where conditions are truly bleak, Mercy Beyond Borders Scholars have chosen some dramatic volunteer work. Many spend their vacation months teaching full-time at local schools, visiting prisons, hauling water or collecting firewood for the blind or disabled, such as those with Hansen’s disease (leprosy).
Now here’s a first: a girl tutoring a boy in South Sudan!
Most South Sudanese boys view girls as worthless. Few families allow girls to go to school at all.
Vionzy Keji excelled as a Mercy Beyond Borders Scholar. She devoted every summer vacation to teaching (pro bono) in the local boys’ school.
She graduated from University of Eldoret in 2018 with a degree in Agriculture and Animal Husbandry. An international NGO hired her in South Sudan as their Project Manager of Livestock. That’s a privileged position in a culture that reveres cattle more than women.