Roseau Valley students shown how to LiveDifferent

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This article was published 06/12/2024 (485 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Personal stories of tragedy, temptation, and ultimate triumph were shared with Roseau Valley School (RVS) students in the hopes of stoking the flame of inspiration to serve their community.

Dominion City has already reaped the benefits of students motivated by visits from LiveDifferent, a Canadian organization formed 24 years ago promoting compassion in youth. Even before the arrival of LiveDifferent’s young adult speakers on Nov. 26, RVS students had helped organize a free thrift store for parents and students called My Cousin’s Closet.

CEO Charles Roberts and a couple board members were in Dominion City to watch the young presenters in front of the school’s Grades 6 to 12 students.

Roberts explained how the program’s main goal was not to create more young volunteers serving communities locally and around the world – that was just a positive result of their focus.

“Even today, 29 percent of all of our young people who die in Canada each year do so by suicide,” explained Roberts, who has been leading the organization for the last 20 years.

Statistics Canada lists that as the second leading cause of death in 10-19-year-olds after accidental injury.

“I didn’t want to create a program that goes into schools and talks about anxiety, depression and suicide. I want to talk about life including hope and purpose, positive youth development and get to the root causes of the issues, not just deal with the symptoms,” said Roberts.

The message sent is that is achieved by leading lives of compassion and service: helping yourself by getting outside of yourself and helping others. A message of refocusing priorities away from shallow social media obsessions that can be damaging for a young minds was part of the presentation.

Roberts believes LiveDifferent is Canada’s largest youth face-to-face program of its kind, now meeting 100,000 students every year across the country. That includes an ice road tour to northern Manitoba, where a group of Indigenous students joined WestJet employee volunteers to build a home in the Dominican Republic this summer.

Students as young as 14 can travel alone with the organization to build homes in places like the Dominican, Mexico and Thailand. Younger students can come with parents or guardians.

One young woman who experienced that sort of trip to Mexico as a teenager was presenter Alexis Fulton.

The young woman described how when she was 12, her father taught her a harsh lesson about responsibility. He had faked the loss of her little brother, who she was constantly responsible to look after. It made her feel alone and like she was a surrogate parent without a life of her own.

When she was 14, Fulton said she was contemplating suicide.

Then LiveDifferent came to her school and she heard about the opportunity to go to Mexico to build a home for an impoverished family.

“I desired to do something actually meaningful with my life,” said Fulton, who decided she was going on that trip during the presentation at her school.

She organized a bottle drive and fundraised for the trip.

“For the first time in my life I was doing something for someone else not because I needed to, but because I wanted to,” Fulton told the students.

She described how after the house was built, the teenage boy Alejandro who lived there started going to school. It was the key for the entire family to move forward with their lives.

Another young speaker, Jacqueline Castiglion, lived the allegory of what the program was trying to get across to the kids.

Her dad inherited a lot of money when she was younger. He rented a large, fancy home and she went to an international school.

“The problem was on the outside it looks cool, but on the inside this house was empty. It didn’t have food, and I used to be hungry all the time,” described Castiglion.

She said her hunger got so bad she developed chronic bad breath. She even tried washing her mouth with soap after being made fun of at school.

At Christmas, longing for a cherished family moment, Castiglion created some homemade gifts to surprise her family. Everyone left as soon as she shared her gifts.

And they could only afford to stay in the house for one year.

That is when her vice principal took her in. While living at her home, Castiglion found herself stealing pastry meant for her caretaker’s daughter. She described fighting demons that had her considering taking her own life.

She described the anger she felt as she walked out of the home and into the street.

“But you know who was more angry than me?” Castiglion asked the RVS students, many leaning forward as they listened to her harrowing story.

“My teacher. And she stormed after me… and she said, ‘You know what Jacqueline? You have to stop being the victim of your story.’

“She told me that it’s up to me to take care of myself. Nobody else can take care of me for me.”

She said the key for her was learning how to fail and try again, and then do it all over again.

Simon Deditch was leading the LiveDifferent team at RVS. He pointed to a students sitting with one of the volunteers, and how having someone other than an authority figure like a parent or teacher was a good way to reach a young person.

“For people to relate to something, it needs to be personalized,” said Deditch.

“Each year we offer brand new stories of up to five people sharing them, and we try to tailor them so that everyone can get something out of it.”

LiveDifferent has stopped sending volunteers to Haiti due to safety concerns, but the work continues through its Freedom Village in the north part of the country, away from the chaotic violence of the cities.

It is a place for girls six to 16 years old to escape being sold or given away by parents who do not have the resources to care for them. There are an estimated 300,000 girls who need this help.