Story
<p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><strong>Why I'm volunteering for Raleigh</strong></p>
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<p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Every generation faces its' own challenges. Mine is no different – but where my parents faced the possibility of nuclear war, we now face equally worrying scenarios of environmental destruction, economic meltdown, human rights abuses and the like.</p>
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<p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">It has become normal to hear that young people today are too apathetic, too dumb, too soft in the head or too callous in the heart. Raleigh has been consistently proving the sceptics wrong for over twenty years, and will continue to do so.</p>
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<p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">It's on us now. And we will rise up to the challenges the world throws us simply because we have to, as each and every generation did before us. But whether we succeed is not a question of whether our resources are sufficient, or anything so prosaic. No, the battles we fight will be won or lost on the field of human character, with all its' treacherous and difficult terrain. To be up to the task (and a mammoth task it is too) we must be good enough, we must invest in ourselves and each other. And Raleigh International is about exactly that.</p>
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<p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Do away with the lists of schools built, sanitation facilities developed, endangered species protected. Beneficial as they are, those things are just at the surface of the true benefit of what Raleigh does across the world. The real payback is to be found in the people, in the flowering of determination and resilience, in the development of indestructible humour, in prejudices challenged and bridges between cultures built.</p>
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<p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Into the forge of the expedition we go as raw youth. Under the heat of intense work, privation and discomfort, our characters are hammered into proper shape by the exigencies of the world around us, depending on their original inclinations. Out of the forge we leave; sharper, stronger, barely three months older but how much more <em>experienced</em>. And back to our communities we go, prepared in some small sense to be the men and women we were born to be.</p>
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<p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">So we will live, and learn, and grow, and work hard. And if we are good enough, we will take the lessons we learned and use them to pass on the world to our <em>own</em> children in a better condition than how we found it.</p>
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<p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">It's on us now.</p>
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<p class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">- JS</p>