Before Peter Batty takes a group of students abroad to help a marginalised community, he always tells them this: you’re not going to change lives.
“One of the things I stress is you’re not going to change their lives, because that is their life,” the St Mary’s College Enrichment Programs/Social Justice co-ordinator says.
“But you are providing them with care, compassion, love and support.”
Since 2005, St Mary’s College in Adelaide city has run a yearly immersion and social justice program aimed at promoting a local, national and global understanding of social and cultural inequities born out of history.
Throughout the year, students learn about homelessness, gender equity, multiculturalism, asylum seekers and indigenous perspectives.
Immersions started with a trip to Vietnam where students worked with disabled children at the Phu My Orphanage and have gone on to include two other annual trips – one to Cambodia to teach children English, the other to Oak Valley, in Queensland, to build relationships with Anangu people.
Mr Batty says he prepares students by showing videos of past trips and while this equips them to an extent, it doesn’t beat being on different land.
“It’s not until you’re there and you can actually smell and see and touch that it hits them,” he says. “They come to the realisation that their world isn’t the only world.”
Mr Batty says the students, who are selected via a written application and interview process, often return with a changed mindset. “I’ve taken 200 students and a few of them have gone onto special ed or disability, and a lot of girls also take up volunteer work,” he says.
“I have a lot of ex-students ring me and say, ‘can you connect me with the orphanage, I’d love to go back and do some volunteer work’. I had six women, now in their twenties, go back and do that.”
Mr Batty says the social justice program is an important cog in the school’s culture and works on a “head, heart and hands approach”.
“You can understand social injustice and feel it in your heart, but with your hand you can actually do stuff with them.”
This content was originally published in Advertiser feature on May 6 2017
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