‘Service Above Self ’ —

NHS Student Wins Essay Contest, Will Travel To Haiti

By Jeff White

Jonathan Jossick has never been on an airplane, and the farthest he has been away from home is Virginia. In early June, that will all change.

Jonathan, 15, recently won the essay contest for Newtown’s Rotary district and will accompany medical professionals to Haiti for one week to volunteer in rural villages. Along with other Rotarians, Jonathan will join Newtown residents Nick Borrello, a dentist, and Dot Baumert, a registered nurse.

“I’ve done a lot of preparing for this, and I think the judges saw my desire to do this,” Jonathan said during a free period at the high school. “I went up against a lot of competition.”

The competition included more than 40 students from Newtown’s Rotary district, which includes neighboring towns. Jonathan beat out five other students whose essays were chosen as finalists.

The essay had to explain why the student wanted to go to Haiti, and describe how the student planned on presenting his experience to others upon his or her return.

“I expect an emotional experience while attending,” Jonathan wrote. “Based on what I’ve heard, Haiti is very different than that of the United States. I want to see it with my own eyes to give myself a clearer definition of who they are and who I am, and what service means to others, and learning about the way of life from a different standpoint.”

Jonathan’s essay was good enough to impress Newtown Rotarian Earl J Smith. “I was privileged to read what he wrote,” Mr Smith said. Concerning Jonathan’s remarks, Mr Smith added, “I think that it is a good purpose for any of us to have an opportunity to get to know ourselves. I thought it was a mature insight.”

During the week he will be away, Jonathan will assist Dr Borrello and other medical practitioners, while also providing some basic volunteer services to impoverished villages. “I think a lot of the sights are going to shock me,” he predicts. “I’m not going to see houses made out of wood, for example. Most houses are made out of straw down there.”

Although his trip will follow the course of the fifteen other youths that have participated in past years, how Jonathan plans to present his experiences will differ. Whereas past Rotary students have taken pictures and presented slide shows, Jonathan plans on video taping a substantial portion of the adventure to show as a documentary.

Newtown Rotarians will provide the sophomore with video equipment to make this possible. “I want to make the presentation open ended, so that different groups can see it from their own end,” he says.

In preparing for the trip, Jonathan has been working with high school social studies teachers, in particular veteran faculty member Jan Brookes, who is interested in helping Jonathan present his project next year. He hopes, as a junior, to do an independent study comparable to a senior project in which he will lecture on his experiences, complete with video, to the “area” social studies classes throughout the high school.

Jonathan is an active member of Interact, a service club at the high school that draws much of its service philosophy from Rotary principles. “Both Interact and Rotary are all about service above self,” Jonathan points out. He plans on taking his experiences to the middle school next year as well, where he hopes to establish a middle school chapter of Interact.

Besides being busy researching Haiti, Jonathan has to work a little harder than most of his classmates; he needs to be finished with school by June 2. He has arranged to take his final exams early, so that he can place all of his attention on his trip.

He is a student that certainly has made the most out of the high school’s varied social studies offerings. Always a student interested in how other places “work,” some of Jonathan’s favorite classes have been sociology, Middle Eastern, Asian, and Modern European studies. Although only halfway through his high school career, he already has an inkling about what he might want to study in college: “sociology and world culture issues,” he says.

And maybe in the next few years, he can take his wanderlust to other parts of the globe, say Venezuela or China, two countries he says he would like to visit.

In the eyes of Earl J. Smith, Jonathan’s up-coming trip to Haiti amounts to a great opportunity for a young student. “It’s a super opportunity,” he says. “One of the emphasis in Rotary is to get actively involved with young people, to help people at an early age to understand the importance of volunteering.”

For Jonathan Jossick, the trip’s promises extend beyond volunteer opportunities. He hopes it will bring about a transformation within him. “This is going to be something completely new, from every phase of the trip,” he says. “The things I’ll see will probably change my life.”