On a mission to help fight hunger and poverty

Sophia Dayani is on a mission. It is a personal mission that involves many of the world’s poorest people. It involves taking the steps needed to help provide them with some of life’s basic necessities. It is a mission eagerly engaged by this Sandy Creek High School sophomore.

Aside from her high school responsibilities, Key Club activities, volunteering in hospital settings and at the Ismaili Center and babysitting, Sophia participates in Youth Engaged in Service (Y.E.S.), a program of the Aga Khan Foundation (AKF). Another project on her participation list, the AKF-sponsored Partnership Walk, is designed to raise funds for the poorest of the poor in Asia and Africa.

With Mother Teresa as her role model, Dayani displays something that far supersedes the intellectual capacity to understand the plight of others. Born in conscience, it is clear that she possesses the willingness to turn empathy into action. The fact that Dayani is 15 years old is irrelevant. Dayani’s mission to help others was accelerated last year during a trip to India with her mother. It was in Bombay that she witnessed a sight that touched her heart and propelled her into taking a stand for help and hunger.

“There is a lot of poverty in India. When you see how the unfortunate live you kind of feel like you can do something to make a difference. You’re there going shopping while other people are on the street trying to find some way to get some food for that day. That hit me, to see how they live,” Dayani explained. “The whole Partnership (Walk) thing happens every year. It helps people in rural countries. It doesn’t believe in a hand out, it believes in a helping hand, which makes it better. Right now, I’m in Youth Engaged in Service, where I do community service within our community and that motivates me even more because I realize where that help is going to go. Every time I think about it I think about the scene in India because with the Partnership Walk we can help them have hope.”

From her firsthand experience in India, Dayani later developed a Power Point presentation shown at Sandy Creek High School and to the faculties at North Fayette Elementary and Burch Elementary. Those efforts raised $540 for hunger and poverty in Asia and Africa.

Seeing with her own eyes the plight of some of the world’s poorest people, the children who do not know where the next meal will come from, Dayani returned emboldened with a view that to some may be regarded as purely idealistic. But to her, the effort to extend her assistance takes on a realistic, even pragmatic, perspective contained inside a humanitarian world-view.

“Once you see the people and how they live you realize how fortunate you are,” said the always-thinking Dayani. “My theory is that if you are fortunate, you have a duty or responsibility to help those who are unfortunate. Because everyone has a lot of potential. If you look at someone who doesn’t have any money, if you help them, that person who has a lot of potential could help the world in some way. So if you help every person possible you are helping society itself.”

Dayani is well aware that many of Earth’s 6.5 billion inhabitants care little, if any, about such humanitarian concerns. But Dayani is not dissuaded.

“Mother Teresa is my role model because of the way she helped everyone. That is what I want to do. Maybe not exactly how she did it, but I want to follow in her footsteps,” Dayani said. “I like the way she affected people, regardless of who they were or what disease they had. She just wanted to help. And that’s what I want to do. And I think all of us should help. I think more and more of us should follow in her footsteps, then we could spread the message to even more people. Then even more people could be helped.”

Sitting close by, listening to their daughter’s words, Dayani’s parents had a smile on their faces and in their eyes.

“The main thing you get is satisfaction. It’s not the money or the recognition. It’s an inner satisfaction that you are doing something you’re supposed to do,” explained Dayani’s mother Shahenaz. “If you help someone, even in a minute way, and even if that person doesn’t realize it right now, the time might come when that help will strike that person. And that person can spread the message. With the effort Sophia was putting into this, I would sometimes tell her to stop because she had other things to do, like studying. But she kept on doing it.”

Sophia Dayani’s father, Jalal Dayani, explained that funds raised through activities such as the Partnership Walk multiplies as much as seven times over because corporate and organizational donors provide matching funds for money collected by individual and group efforts.

“I think what Sophia is doing is for the whole of humanity. Not for one person, not for this country but for the whole world,” Jalal Dayani said. “The money collected here is multiplying and reaching thousands of miles to the other side of the world. AKF is a non-profit network and every dollar that is collected goes 100 percent to the cause.”

The annual Partnership Walk to alleviate global poverty is sponsored by Aga Kahn Development Network (AKDN) to benefit some of the poorest communities in Africa and Asia to improve their living conditions regardless of origin, gender, race, religion or political affiliation, according to information supplied by the foundation.

Since its inception in the United States in 1995, the Partnership Walk has involved 185,000 people who raised $22.9 million to help train teachers and nurses, provide educational opportunities, improve school facilities and curricula and boost farmer’s productivity, according to the Aga Kahn Foundation 2005 Annual Report. Partnership Walk contributors include organizations such as American Red Cross, Johnson & Johnson, Rockefeller Foundation and U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, U.S. Dept. of State and Agency for International Development (USAID).

Given Dayani’s current undertakings it is an obvious question what she might do in the future. Like most teenagers, and many adults, her future course is not set, but the foundation of her world-view is.

“I don’t know about the future but all I know from my point of view, I think that as time goes on my concern will grow more and more and my passion will get bigger than it is already,” Dayani said smiling. “I’ll be more devoted and motivated to continue. My passion is really big right now and I think it’s going to get bigger and bigger.”

Though quite young in years, Dayani is old enough to have learned already what many far older than she refuse to learn. Dayani already knows that complacency is the parent of defeat and that conscious willingness is the progeny of a more fulfilling life. Sophia Dayani is already living the often overlooked truth that the only way to make a difference is to be the difference.

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