10/30/2004 The story was about what an 8-year-old boy from Sierra Leone had experienced during a civil war in the African country. The boy watched his best friend get shot and killed for refusing to kill another boy when ordered to by one of the soldiers who had kidnapped the children. Mr. Opatowski said the only reason the first boy was alive to tell the story is that he chose to kill when presented with the same choice. Today, the boy says he’ll never forget the look on the dead boy’s face. He says he can still hear the boy’s screams. One of the students at the third annual Speak Out on Friday asked if the story — which Mr. Opatowski told in first person — was true. It was true, he said. “This is not my story,” he said. “I heard this story told by a 12-year-old boy.” Mr. Opatowski was the keynote speaker at Speak Out, a program for students in seventh through 12th grades. Almost 200 students from various schools throughout Cattaraugus and Allegany counties attended the program on Friday at the Christ United Methodist Church. He told the students that the civil war started as a fight over controlling the diamond mines in Sierra Leone and that as the war progressed, both the rebels and the government needed children to fight. Mr. Opatowski said making the children fight as soldiers is a form of child labor. He then discussed child labor before discussing world problems such as poverty, hunger, and war.“What I’m getting at is . . . there are a lot of problems in the world,” he said. He then talked about how today’s teenagers have been stereotyped as being lazy and selfish. He also said people talk about them as the leaders of tomorrow, but he encouraged them to become leaders now. His presentation is part of the Leaders Today “Me to We” program. Mr. Opatowski is a speaker, curriculum writer and summer trip coordinator for Free the Children and Leaders Today, two youth organizations based in Toronto. “Instead of thinking about me, me, me, start thinking about we,” he urged. He told the students to decide if they’re going to be one of those people who wait for someone else to take care of the world’s problems or choose to be one of the people trying to take care of the problems. Mr. Opatowski became involved in the Free the Children six years ago, at age 16, after talking with a friend who worked for the organization. He decided to go to a Free the Children camp because he was interested in free trips and had found out that many of the young volunteers for the organization were girls. “I went for every single wrong reason you can think of,” he said. Mr. Opatowski, once considered a class clown and labeled by teachers as a trouble-maker, said his attitude changed after listening to a 13-year-girl give a speech on child labor. He started a Free the Children group at his school and they held fund-raisers and used the money to build a school in India. The group also handed out sandwiches to homeless people. He talked about his first volunteer trip, which was to a town in Jamaica that was built inside of a garbage dump. He said when the bus pulled into the town, which was a gated community, all the volunteers’ breathing stopped, but not because of the smell. “You look out and all you see is row after row and pile after pile of garbage,” he said. The volunteers thought they were passing through the garbage on the way to the residential section of the town but soon realized they were in the residential section of the town. While in Jamaica, the volunteers spent the first half of the day teaching the children English then spent the rest of it playing with them. Mr. Opatowski encouraged the students to come together to fight against problems they see. He said they don’t have to try to pick a world-wide problem. He told them they could do something simple like stopping someone from telling a racist joke or talking to someone who sits alone at lunch. “It starts right here at home ... Everything you do does make a change, anything is possible,” he said. “When we get involved, when we get together, we can make a change.” After Mr. Opatowski’s presentation, the students attended workshops dealing with issues such as suicide, HIV/AIDS, teen pregnancy and alcohol and substance abuse. Mr. Opatowski also presented a workshop on leadership. Speak Out ended with an open forum for the students to talk about the issues they learned about. Speak Out was sponsored by the Cattaraugus County Youth Development Coalition. The coalition is comprised of the ACCORD Corp., Community Action, Cattaraugus County Council on Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Inc. and the county’s youth bureau and health department. Source: The Times Herald, Orlean, N.Y., |