Last summer in 2003, I went to visit Bangladesh and seen many children on the streets who were very poor. Some of them were around my age and some of them were younger. They couldn’t attend school because they had to earn to support themselves and their families. I was very sad to see these children begging on the streets for money. I knew that I could no longer tolerate all this poverty and these children suffering at such a young age. Right away I wanted to do something about it, but I knew I couldn’t do it alone.

            We have so much to be thankful for and yet at times we don’t appreciate what God has given us. Many children in Bangladesh don’t even know if they’ll be able to eat a full meal. Why can’t we take a moment to be thankful for what we have?

            Last Fall when school started, I had talked to my friends about the idea and they said they’d be pleased to help me out, so we decided to start a new organization called Reaching Out To Others (ROTO). Within a few days, the school principal, Dr. Warfel approved our proposal, and we were also very lucky to have our language teacher, Jason Flum as our advisor.  I do have to say that Mr.Flum was quite hesitant when we approached him to be our advisor. “But Mr. Flum,” we implored. “You don’t really have to do anything. We’ll do all the work, you just need to advise us.” He then doubtfully signed the paper wondering what he had gotten himself into. Little did he know that what we said was true.  

The purpose of the organization is to help disadvantaged students in Asia.  We had talked about many ideas for raising funds and we thought that by having a cultural show we would able to do that successfully. 

            We thought that we’d have a Bake Sale to start us off. We baked the goods ourselves and raised about $50.00. From there, we moved onto the bigger project, our first fundraising show. We found sponsors and planned an entertaining evening. After subtracting our expenses, which was $950, we were left with a net of $3,168. Without the help of many people we wouldn’t have been able to put this altogether. I’d like to give a special thanks to The Mahmud Family, the Islam Family, the Chowdhury Family and the governing body of The Reformed Church of Highland Park, New Jersey.

            The money will be evenly distributed to five schools in Bangladesh. The schools are as follows: The School for the Blind in Dhaka, two make-shift schools (for slum residents) at Noatola, and Badda-Gulshan, Dhaka and two village schools in Faridpur. Feroz K. Chowdhury who will be visiting Bangladesh this summer will go and distribute the donations on behalf of ROTO. As of now, the organization plans on having one cultural show every year and holding bake sales. We hope that we will be able to help disadvantaged students and be successful in doing so.    

For more information on ROTO and how to make donations you can contact us at reachoutasia@yahoo.com