On the 11th of March, I participated in a zoom meeting with 30 other students from around New Zealand. This was as a replacement for the World Vision Senior Scholarship Summit that I was awarded last year. I'm thankful it was moved online as I had Covid at the time!

In the week prior to the meeting, we all joined a group chat so that we could interact and participate in fun activities, almost just as we would have done if we were together in person.

To break the ice, we had a discussion about our favourite pair of shoes - many of us chose our Birkenstocks. This led to a talk about leadership, the primary reason for the scholarship. We learned that shoes represent us and our style as they do for the leaders who have been before us, who have walked the same paths, paving the way for us.

This year, World Vision is not focusing on one particular part of the world but instead working to ensure that different communities have access to clean water sources. We learned to acknowledge that “the world is beautifully broken.” The beauty allows us to serve and give back to our fellow people by tackling and resolving the brokenness of the world. In doing so, we strive to ensure equality and equity between all people.

In our context, we have the novelty of choosing shoes for fashion and we often don’t have to walk far in them. In places like Africa, however, shoes are a privilege. Some children miss school to get water. They walk three kilometres each way carrying a bucket, often bigger than themselves, to retrieve swamp water. A cleaner water source (one which would still be perceived as dirty by us) may be as far as seven kilometres away. This is heartbreaking.

I found the Summit to be empowering and motivating. It showed me how much of a privilege life is and, also, how easily we can make a difference in the life of someone else.