While most teenagers were living it up during their mammoth, 10-week summer vacation, Richmond’s Omeid Niyaz spent a few days seeing, with his own eyes, a very different kind of living on the other side of the planet.
Omeid, who has just started Grade 11 at Cambie secondary, delivered, with his own hand, 100 packages of school supplies to orphans in Afghanistan.
Armed only with his mom, Maryam, Omeid, while visiting relatives in neighbouring Uzbekistan, flew across the country to the Afghan border, where the pair crossed into Afghanistan and then used a taxi to travel 90 minutes to the city of Mazari-I-Sharif.
Omeid had intended to gift the packages to a local school, but while staying with a friend of his mom’s in Mazari-I-Sharif, he was told of an orphanage in the city that would no doubt love to receive the supplies that had been bought with funds raised by a group of Cambie students, called Brothers Helping Others.
Most of the children — about 80 to 90 of them, aged from seven to 12 — were not at the orphanage when Omeid and his mom arrived with their gifts, but they arranged to go back the very next day.
“They had gathered all the children for us. They were super-shy at first; I don’t think this had ever happened before,” said Omeid, who was born in Afghanistan, before moving to Canada as a baby.
“We told them we were from Canada and then we started handing out the packages of notebooks and pencils. They were still really shy, but then they all started smiling and giggling. That part was great to see.”
Conditions at the orphanage were “terrible, compared to here,” said Omeid, adding that he and his mom were only able to travel into Afghanistan because it was a “safe day.”
“Sometimes it’s safe and sometimes it’s not. It was safe that day,” he said.
“I was a little nervous, but I speak the local tongue, Farsi, so that makes things a little easier, even if I do have a bit of an accent.”
After delivering the packages, including juice boxes and snacks bought by Omeid out of is own pocket, the pair couldn’t get a flight back across Uzbekistan, so they had to drive for 12 hours on a rough road.
“It was worth it,” said Omeid. “It was pretty amazing and it was very emotional seeing the kids, especially knowing that they don’t have parents to guide them.
“Going to the orphanage was a life-changing experience. Seeing these kids…in one of the poorest countries in the world had a huge emotional impact on me.
“The original reason I chose to give school supplies was because, if Afghanistan wants to grow…education is the number one thing needed. And you cannot learn without the necessary tools.”
Omeid and his fellow “Brothers” are now talking about putting on a slide show for the Cambie students, to show them how their $431, raised mostly via a coin drive, benefitted others less fortunate.
Brothers Helping Others is a 15 or so-strong group of all-male, mainly Grade 11 Cambie students, which has fundraised for various causes for the last three years.
