Win a Trip You Won’t Forget

I would be applying for this if I could...

A few years ago, soon after I returned disconsolate and shellshocked from a trip to Darfur, I found New Yorkers burning with moral outrage.

The spark wasn’t genocide, war or poverty, but rather homelessness — of a red-tailed hawk nicknamed Pale Male. Managers of a Fifth Avenue apartment building had dismantled his nest.

Fury! Television cameras! And public pressure that led to a solution for rebuilding the nest.

I wondered how some of that compassion for a hawk could be rechanneled to help human beings like those I had just seen dying in Darfur. The potential is vast: just imagine if we felt the same sympathy for the 25,000 children who will die today of poverty as we do for, say, a lost and terrified puppy on the street. But it’s very difficult to generate activism for distant people whom we can’t visualize.

So I concocted a contest to take a university student with me on a reporting trip to Africa. I figured that the student’s journey might help connect American students to truly desperate needs abroad.

We’ve held two of these student trips so far, and today I’m delighted to announce the third.

If you apply, you should know that within The Times, my colleagues say that first prize is one trip with Kristof. Second prize is two trips.

But they’re just jealous. The trip may not be comfortable, but if you don’t obsess about rats under the beds, bats in the outhouses or drunken soldiers at checkpoints, then the trip will be memorable and perhaps even life-changing.

If you win, you won’t be practicing tourism but journalism. You’ll blog for nytimes.com and file videos for The Times and for YouTube.

I’m doing this for two reasons. First, I want to engage young people about global issues that I’m passionate about. Second, it’s good journalism, for you’ll bring a tool to reporting from Africa that I no longer have: a fresh eye.
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One of the failures of the American education system is that it rarely exposes students to life around the world. As Bill Gates put it in his 2007 Harvard commencement address, “I left Harvard with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world.”

Let’s hope that Barack Obama’s presidency makes public service more appealing. But if you want to save the world, you first must understand it.

So, embed yourself deep within a developing country for a summer or a year. I wish colleges would offer credit for such gritty experiences — and extra credit for getting intestinal worms.

I’ve posted some overseas volunteer possibilities, from helping at a maternity hospital in Somaliland to teaching English to brothel children in India, on my blog. Even if you don’t win my trip, you can still win your own.