Providing Hope One Step at a Time

Natascha Yogachandra and "Hope Is Life"

“ Youth can move the world.” This was the message emphasized and repeated throughout Natascha Yogachandra inspiring speech. The high school junior of Ruamrudee International school in Bangkok is the founder of three successful organizations that all work towards toward one goal; spreading hope through the education of impoverished people.

When Natascha was seven years old her father opened her eyes to the situations of the poor in the world through international travel. Seeing the lack of education provided in third world countries and saying that she “ couldn’t fathom a world where there was no books,” she decided to start the Project Book Angels. Through this organization she collected used books from neighbors and relatives, packaging them and sending them to under privileged communities across the world. Building on the idea, she opened libraries in impoverished areas, managing to open 20 around the globe. One of the success stories came from the Malawi children’s village in India, a village of three thousand orphans where a library and learning center was opened, hosting a collection of over 1,000 books. Seeing the happiness brought to the children’s faces, Natascha stated, “These children don’t know what they can do, if they have the values and the willingness to learn, they can achieve their dreams.

Four years ago, the destruction left by the tsunami devastated Asia, many chose to mourn the disaster and move on, but Natascha, then eleven, acted upon her sorrow. She began yet another charity out reach foundation, the Butterfly Project, working to provide the effected people with hope and necessities. Money was raised to provide textbooks and school materials for children whose schools had been ruined. Unlike many NGOs assisting the damaged communities, The Butterfly Project worked to assist people by giving them products they actually needed: Natascha and her family traveled to Thailand, visiting a fisherman’s village. They asked the community what they needed most and the response was hurricane lamps, The fisherman wanted to continue their trade; The next morning, the Yogachandra family delivered hurricane lamps to the people. Natascha commented that “it’s about providing hope, hope is a waking dream, and the youth is the power behind it.”

Now all of Natascha’s focus and energy goes into the foundation Hope is Life, which she is both chairperson and founder of. Some of the goals of the foundation are to help HIV aids children in Vietnam, build learning centers in the impoverished areas, and sponsoring under privileged teenage girls to receive an education. In Kolkata, Natascha and her family provided funds for a center of abused girls to go back to school, she explained her actions by stating, “I believe educating girls is just as important as educating boys, the first teachers of children are their mothers.”

The following keynote speaker in this morning’s presentation was Dr. Mechai Viravaidya, founder and chairman of the most successful nonprofit organization in Thailand, PDA. The project it is most recently involved with, and the focus of his speech is the development of rural schools across Thailand, focusing on the example of LPMP, Lumplaimat School. The primary school he had developed has been ranked second in Thailand, compared to government schools. He wanted to make the impression that a private education, while being more expensive is worth the education that they deliver. His school was ranked against the University of Tasmania, and proven to be of an excellently high global standard. Though developed in a rural community, through hard work, the goal of education for all can be reached. Dr. Viravaidya stated “schools become a center of change in rural communities.” The goal of his lecture was to motivate all the schools attending GIN to return to their countries and open their own schools, and promote local ones, he finished by adding “think out of the box, don’t take no for an answer.”

Both Dr. Mechai Viravaidya and Natascha Yogachandra have the same goal in mind. They strive to educate the youth of today so that poverty may sometime be eradicated. Their speeches gave us new insight on the value of education and the importance of hope.

By Katie Eliot and Emma Raymond (International School Bangkok