improving living conditions in
third-world countries
poverty continues to be a
xiety today according to UNICEF about
22,000 children die around the world
each day because of poverty many people
have been working tirelessly to
organizations such as UNICEF and the Red
Cross to provide aid for these
struggling people but clearly more needs
to be done that truly rid the world of
poverty and its associated problems
clearly that intended footprints that we
are leaving behind are being washed away
so how can we leave our footprints
behind in such a way so that they remain
permanent and are not washed away in the
blink of an eye today I’ll discuss how I
was personally able to experience
alternative approaches to
humanitarianism which sowed the seeds
for footprints that will last for an
eternity as a sophomore in high school
last year I joined the chinmaya
Organization for Rural Development which
is also known as cord this service
organization works to empower woman
educate children and improve working and
living conditions for the most poorest
and isolated farmers in India to
maximize its efforts every year cord
hosts to service visits for high school
students to travel to and work in these
targeted villages fortunately last year
I was selected to take part in one of
these service visits I was assigned to a
small village called DoDEA which is in
the northeast region of India this
village had been identified and selected
by cord because it had experienced many
droughts and was at the bottom of the
most impoverished areas in India in this
village little kids ran around and
played in the fields without any clothes
on the huts that they called home were
made out of mud and cow dung and were
about shorter than me in height the
fuels did not have very many crops and
the people were thin and fragile from
battling hunger in a country that has
continuously been identified as being in
shambles by the international community
I began to embrace the transformative
changes that I was going to undertake
through cord granted cord is not a
panacea for global atrocities but is a
microcosm of goals that differentiates
itself from the others that seek to
mitigate crises the first footprint that
we established the cord was independence
for growth this was done through
projects that were direct
empowering farmers to fend for
themselves during a drought previously
we learned that another humanitarian
organization had helped the farmers
acquire fertilizers and other chemicals
to improve their crop production however
the farmers were not given enough
information on how to actually use the
products they’re inefficient methods had
ruined the solar quality after they ran
out of materials the farmers went back
to the same organization and bought more
materials this created a never-ending
cycle in which the farmers bought more
and more fertilizers without the crop
production actually improving so to fix
this problem we showed the farmers how
to create a natural fertilizer from cow
dung which also improved the soil
quality and after showing them how to
make it we guided them through the steps
as they made their own fertilizer and
finally we took them out in the village
we took them out in the fields and
actually showed them how to use the cops
with their how to use the fertilizer
with their crops now the main difference
between the first organization and
–cord is that the first organization
did not allow the farmers to be
independent they came and gave the
farmers a hand out in the form of
farming materials with cord we made sure
that we gave them a hand up instead of a
hand out and there’s a saying that
perfectly perfectly captures the way
that cord works the saying goes like
this you give a man a fish you feed him
for a day you teach a man how to fish
and you feed him for a lifetime
this saying truly resonated with me
during this project when we allow these
farmers to be independent that is when
we are truly able to leave our
footprints behind in their communities
today these farmers live on perfectly
capable of fending for themselves
however this has not always been the
case in history on a broader level and
now Titus’s failure in establishing his
or her footprint in somebody else’s
territory has led to catastrophic
results for example in the 19th century
the Western powers scrambled to leave
their footprints behind in various parts
of the world the European leaders saw
Africa and Asia as the homes of
uneducated uncivilized and inferior
races
they felt that that to take up the white
man’s burden and had to bring European
civilization to other parts of the world
so their footprints came in the form of
neo imperialism and colonialism the
European powers used their superior
technology that swiftly bring the these
regions under their control that created
their own colonial governments and
impose their own rules and ideology upon
the people
this subjugation and coercing of the
native people into accepting the
European culture is where the Europeans
failed and actually establishing their
footprint the Europeans did improve some
parts of society by providing the native
people with the railroads to improve
transportation and starting the
industrialization process needed for
modernization however their social their
social work was not genuine they were
guided by their sense of superiority and
arrogance they intentionally wanted the
Africans and agents to be dependent on
them and when they left the native
people were not capable of governing
themselves because that spent over 50
years in subjugation the like this lack
of political political and social
stability is the reason behind the
social and political tensions that we
see in various parts of the world today
the corruption homicides and many other
negative events can be directly linked
to the fail to the Europeans failure in
establishing their footprint we must
remember that to truly help somebody
grow we have to make sure that they are
independent of any outside support
Cologne colonialism still permeates
political spheres today as countries
utilize the perceived weaknesses of
other countries to validate their
agendas the very forces that fail to
alleviate the structural problems that I
saw in India are the same sets of
agendas that are being used in peace
negotiations today from the Oslo the
failures in the israel-palestine
conflict is one key example of how
unauthentic footprints can make a
situation go from bad to worse from the
Oslo Accords to the current peace
processes the voices of the native
people have continuously been
marginalized for the sake of the
political as a result tensions in the
Middle East have been severely fractured
Kord may not be able to deal with
geopolitical problems but it definitely
definitely creates Liberatore changes
through its second footprint which is
independence for growth I’ll explain
this to the toilet project that we
completed in the in bill via the
villagers did not have a proper method
of getting rid of their waste the
exposure to so much waste had created
significant diseases so to fix this
problem we spend about two and a half
days building and in the old-fashioned
Indian toilet and a decomposition pit to
improve the sanitation in the village
now the unique part about this project
was that we the volunteers did not
complete the project on our own we
worked side by side with the farmers to
create this project because the farmers
played an important role in completing
the project we knew that the project
actually meant something to them and
they valued it and because of this we
knew that even after we left the farmers
would continue to use and take advantage
of the project products if we had
completed the project on our own instead
of working with the farmers after we
left this project would have meant
absolutely nothing to them and it would
have been just another symbol of a group
of foreigners who came and visited for
two weeks when will you see a footprint
we don’t see a single uniform shape
there the there’s the main body of the
footprint and then there the five toes
that are attached to these come these
parts come together to create a common
function and taking out even a single
part will distort the shape the same can
be said about humanitarian organizations
working in impoverished countries the
villagers don’t trust us at first and
they don’t find any significant value in
the work we are doing for them however
they are willing to change but it is up
to us to bring out that change in them
just that’s the parts of the just as the
various parts of the footprint come
together to create the footprint we need
to work with the farmers to gain their
trust and their support to make sure
that we are truly leaving a footprint
behind on their community otherwise we
will just be another group of foreigners
who come and go claiming to change the
impoverished community thank you [Applause]