Mystery Alaska

My teammates and I drove from Vancouver, British Columbia, to Seattle, Washington one night last week.  We dumped our personal suitcases out and filled them with shirts, activist journals, and hoodies and boarded a plane to Anchorage, Alaska.  The plan was to find someone who would let us borrow a vehicle to drive around Alaska for a week and a half, and that day, in typical IC fashion, a generous family loaned us their truck.  We were blown away by the scenery as we drove to our first screening at West Valley High School in Fairbanks.  The mountains looked like holograms.  They were like nothing we had ever encountered.

We didn’t really know what to expect as we pulled up to West Valley High.  Neither did they.  What started out as an optional assembly for a few classes ended up filling the auditorium to the brim as more and more classes arrived.   As The Rescue started playing, we could tell that this was going to be a special screening.  By the end of the film, students were coming up to us saying that they had been looking for ways to change the world, and Invisible Children was giving them an opportunity, and we were asked to show The Rescue during every class period.  We continued showing The Rescue all day, and by the last screening, we asked who had seen it once already.  Twice already.  Three times already.  Three fourths of the auditorium had already seen it, and were coming back again and again and again (getting out of class two or three times may or may not have had something to do with it).  These students were deciding that their voices mattered and that they could do something about a war thousands of miles away.  Twenty seven students believed that so much that they signed up for our TRI campaign, which allows us to continue raising awareness to bring an end to this war.  They started a Schools for Schools club and cooked up enough ideas to keep them busy for the entire competition.

Forrest, Claire, Brian and Becky were forced to shield their eyes from the awesomeness

As we were leaving, they thanked us for coming.  They said that we were inspirational.  They said that we had given them a way to change the world.  But it is schools like West Valley High School that are an inspiration to us.  It’s the determined faces of our generation living for something bigger than themselves that keeps us going.  Click here if you want to stand beside the students of West Valley High School and join our TRI campaign.

-Brian Pappalardo
Pacific Northwest Roadie