AISEC-LUMS brings ‘My World My Choice!’ to Pakistan
November 23, 2011
This past spring, when the My World My Choice! (MWMC) founders visited Pakistan, they met up with AISEC-LUMS and introduced their initiative to the LUMS team. My World My Choice! focuses on mentoring young students to be community leaders who emphasize sustainability and lead environmentally-friendly lifestyles.
Since AISEC-LUMS supports several interns from abroad each year, Aneeqa Khan, now the AISEC Project Head for MWMC believed AISEC served as the perfect platform for MWMC to get the word out in Lahore and around the world. Hence, she enthusiastically volunteered her team for the project.
Having leaders from around the world come to Lahore to intern with MWMC means that they can go back to their home countries and launch their own MWMC initiatives there, says Khan. Just this past summer, for example, two interns from Kenya came to Lahore to work under AISEC to help with the MWMC project. Having returned home in early September, they are already in the planning stages for launching a MWMC chapter in Nairobi, including finding co-sponsors for the project.
Back in Lahore, the MWMC vision is growing rapidly under AISEC-LUMS and Khan’s leadership. These past two weeks, a core team of five LUMS students and thirty-five other volunteers visited Beaconhouse Defence Campus, in which they conducted several activities like “Watch Where You Step,” which was created by the LUMS volunteers, and allowed students to see where they stood in their environmental-friendly habits as compared to those of their classmates. Other activities included general presentations on sustainability as well as interactive activities with the students.
Besides their work at the Beaconhouse Defence Campus, the AISEC team went to the SOS Village to spread the word about sustainability and plant twenty-five trees in the compound. This MWMC initiatve not only introduced the concept of sustainability to the students but also taught the volunteers a lot about Pakistan’s education system.
Khan says, “After we visited the Beaconhouse Defence Campus, I realised that Pakistan’s education curriculum lacks certain topics and sustainability is one of them. After our activities and presentations, the children told me that this concept [of sustainability] was never introduced to them before. This made me passionate about working harder to reach more people and save resources for future generations.”
Indeed, the AISEC-LUMS team is working hard to expand their MWMC project and hopes to reach more than a thousand students in Phase I of the project, which will conclude by the end of the fall semester. Their current plans include expanding to other schools like the Lahore Grammar School, as well as introducing new projects. Among these, they plan to host a competition, in which students propose their own projects for sustainability and will present these on an Award Night. Khan says they hope to fund and implement the best project.
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