Name:Kamila Tuyakbayeva
Age: 20
Country: Kazakhstan
My usual activism is shown in trainings and seminars I
conduct with the help of our team members. But I would like to tell you about
Summer Leadership School (SLS) we organize every summer for children from
orphanages, young people living with HIV and AIDS and activists from different
communities. Every year we bring all of them together to share with them about
their reproductive health and rights, gender equality, by raising their
awareness about STIS, human trafficking, discrimination with an intention to
built leadership skills. The amazing thing we get to see is them changing in
that week. To see the hope in their eyes, To see them know their own
potentiality, To see the friendship they build with each other, To their
stronger personalities and how they are so confident in themselves, To hear
them saying: “I thought HIV is transmitted through air. But now I know that
being around HIV positive people is not dangerous, they are just people with
weaker immunity”. Every year by the end of the school they come to understand
these things. Every year there are more and more leaders in our communities,
who want to change this world for the better.
6 years ago I was one of those kids: a girl, who knew
nothing about HIV or what “reproductive health” meant. I wasn’t shy and closed,
but I was different from who I am today. SLS made me realize I can do anything,
whether it’s becoming a peer educator, trainer or receiving Presidential
Scholarship to study abroad or being accepted to one of the world’s Top
Universities in America.
Today I volunteer with Y-PEER network and organize SLS
every single year, even though sometimes it’s hard to find funds, or hard to
convince parents to allow their children to participate in the School or just
physically hard to travel from one side of Kazakhstan to another but it is fun
and great adventure on itself. All of us: young people just like you, we go to
colleges, schools; we work, eat ice creams, watch movies and clean our houses.
In addition to that we run SLS because we understand that for some of us this
might be life turning point, it might save someone’s life because SLS provides
so much useful information with so many fun things.. We keep doing this because
it’s now our life. This is my life.
I used to think that charity and social work is for
those, who ear a lot of money and can donate for the common good. But life
isn’t about money, right? It’s about happiness that we bring to each other by
smiling, talking, laughing… by telling the right information, by saying : “YOU.
CAN. DO. ANYTHING”, which is so true. You can act, you can talk, you can change
the world.
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