Tasmania’s Vision Generation

Laura trip enabled her to see the heartbreak and happiness of India

Laura says the happiness of the children will make her think twice before complaining about first world issues

In the 2008 40 hour famine Laura Sykes watched a video of a young aged eight girl called Kajal, who woke every day at 5am to go rag picking to get the best pieces of rubbish to sell on the streets. Four years later Laura has now had the opportunity to travel to India to met a 13 year old Kajal, now enrolled in non-formal education thanks to the work of World Vision.

“I looked at her and just said, ‘you inspired me to take action on ending extreme poverty’,”says Laura.

Originally from Launceston and now based in Hobart, the 19 year old has been involved in World Vision’s youth movement, VGen, for the past six years and is now the Tasmanian State Director.

Having recently won the 2012 Young Achiever of the Year Award in Entrepreneurship for establishing fair trade organisation Go Fair Tasmania, Laura was thrilled at the chance to go to where all her inspiration came from.

“The trip for me was really about building relationships between youth activists here and in developing countries and building that partnership for development. The idea is that we learn from them and they can learn from us,” says Laura.

The World Vision Area Development Programs are a part of the organisations development work and the immersion trips are designed to give young Australians like Laura experience with World Vision work in the field.

“The program inspires young people in Australia to connect with their peers overseas. That’s a difficult thing to do, so what VGen and World Vision are doing, is giving us the chance to go into the field. You can’t teach this kind of thing, it’s learned through stories and meeting people,” says Laura.

Home to millions of child labourers and slaves, India has been a focus of World Vision’s work for decades and Laura says even after years of campaigning and working on issues of development, there was no preparing her for the levels of poverty and underdevelopment.

“If you live on the streets you have sex and you get married; women are subservient to men. There was one girl who was fortunate enough to be taken off the streets and put in a children’s home, she was telling people at the home how she had been forced to get married….she was only six years old,” she says.

World Vision and VGen’s work in the field is key to increasing opportunities for young people within communities in countries like India. Laura says the biggest learning curve for her was learning about young Indians working on campaigns just like she does, to change their own future.

“Young people across the world, in every country, are standing up and saying, ‘hey this isn’t right, I want to make a change in my community’. I’d never thought about the fact that there are people just like me, in India, taking action to help their own country,” she says.

“For example, there are children’s clubs whose members are only about 12 years old. Some of them are campaigning for education. They know off by heart the UN declaration of Human Rights and they go door to door trying to tell parents why they should let their children go to school.”

Laura’s trip gave her the chance to see so many positives coming out of India, especially with the work that organisations like World Vision are doing however, the gravity of the situation is never far away. Laura’s time in India also included visits to children’s homes, and meetings with street kids.

“We would ask children what they wanted to do when they grew up, and what got me was that none of them had ever considered a life outside of slavery or labour. Some of the work that World Vision does is literally sitting an listening to what these exact children need; it’s amazing to think they have never been asked what they want or had any kindness shown to them,” says Laura.

After coming back to reality Laura is now excited to share her knowledge and skills with Tasmanian schools and the community.

“I feel more equipped to inspire other people to take action because i’ve met these young people in India. Whether i’m here in Australia with a university degree, or whether it’s those children in India, we are all searching for a better world and i’m going to continue doing that,” she says.

Laura is holding an information evening at Youth Arc in Hobart on Sunday August 12 at 5pm. If any community groups would like to hear from Laura about how they can get involved in VGen or would like to her Indian Adventure talk please contact her at laura.sykes@vgen.org