People
Why Did the Analyst Cross the Road?
To carry his U of G-honed computer smarts to volunteer stints in Southeast Asia
BY TERESA PITMAN
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| During his first three weeks in Indonesia, Sean Yo travelled through Bali and Java with his father, Ignatius, a retired veterinarian who immigrated to Canada from Indonesia in 1972. In the top photo, Sean Yo poses at a Chinese temple in Denpasar, Bali. Below, father and son stand at the top of Borobudur, a ninth-century Mahayana Buddhist monument in Java. |
Getting to the other side of the street in one piece can be an unexpected challenge in a country with few stoplights and more motorcycles than cars.
“Crossing the road in Indonesia is a profound act of faith,” says Sean Yo, an analyst in Computing and Communications Services who recently returned from a five-week trip to the Southeast Asian country. “The traffic is like a river flowing past, and you just have to jump in and work your way across.”
That experience could also be a metaphor for Yo’s volunteer work. There’s been plenty of “jumping in and working his way across” in two volunteering vacations spent in Indonesia and Nepal.
He went to Nepal in 2007 as one of the first four U of G staff chosen to participate in Leave for Change, the Uniterra program that allows employees to use vacation time to do short-term volunteer stints around the world.
Yo’s original assignment was to do website development with the Fair Trade Group in Nepal, but when he arrived, he discovered the website was already up.
“So I quickly switched gears and worked with them on website assessment, staff training and strategic planning,” he says. His goal was to have the project be self-sustaining after he left.
While in Nepal, he also found time for a little sightseeing, including an elephant safari and a ride in a “terrifying small Indiana Jones-type airplane” that took him over Mount Everest.
Back in Canada, with his appetite for international volunteering whetted, Yo was eager to try another volunteer vacation.
“I’d heard president Alastair Summerlee say that he hoped people who had done Leave for Change would be encouraged to try to arrange similar trips on their own.”
Yo was considering his options when a perfect opportunity came up. His uncle, a semi-retired physician who had founded the Agapé Social Foundation in Indonesia more than a decade earlier, asked him to come and help with the organization’s computer problems. Yo began planning a trip that would involve spending two weeks volunteering at the foundation and three weeks travelling with his father, who immigrated to Canada from Indonesia in 1972.
In support of his volunteer stint, Yo received a grant from the Professional Staff Association’s staff enrichment fund. “Without that, this wouldn’t have been possible,” he says.
He also did some fundraising and collected more than $500 to buy a laser printer for the foundation and to pay for installing the Internet at the Agapé office.
Father and son left Canada April 4 and spent the next three weeks travelling around Java and Bali. Yo got to see the house his father grew up in, met relatives he didn’t know he had and discovered the lush beauty of the Indonesian countryside.
“It was also an amazing time to reconnect with my father,” he says.
At the end of three weeks, Yo’s father returned to Canada, and Yo headed off to stay with his uncle. The Agapé Social Foundation’s offices were right across the street — a street that took longer than you’d expect to get across every morning because of the constant flow of traffic.
Yo found his skills were in high demand at the foundation. “I did IT training to build capacity, designed a new website and set up an e-mail and collaboration system for them,” he says.
The laser printer he donated proved to be a big hit, he adds. “People would just stand around watching it print and saying: ‘Wow, it’s so fast!’”
Founded in 1997, Agapé runs several programs to help local communities. These include a foster child program that raises money to help send needy children to school. For many families, tuition fees and the cost of buying school uniforms and supplies (about $100 a year) are out of reach, says Yo. Last year, the program sponsored 70 children, but another 50 remain on the waiting list.
Agapé also offers a career training program that helps adults set up a small business at home, a related skills training program that provides classes in specific skills such as computing and English, and a library program.
Yo did some work with staff involved in the skills training program, teaching them about computer security, virus protection, hardware troubleshooting and website design.
“The language barrier in Indonesia was more difficult than in Nepal, where more people speak English,” he says. “Many of the people in Indonesia speak English, too, but it’s very formal, and there was a big gap. I had some support from my cousin, who translated for me, and I used the Indonesian I knew.”
Agapé’s other programs are done in partnership with the local Rotary Club. One involves building wells in communities that don’t have access to clean water. Another is called “Essential Home Renovations.”
In Canada, a “home renovation” might mean putting in a hot tub, says Yo, but in Indonesia, “a lot of people live in shacks with dirt floors, roofs that leak and no plumbing. It rains a lot, and the floors turn to mud.”
The renovations program turns those shacks into small homes with brick walls, leak-proof roofs and concrete floors. The cooking area is set up in a separate room, and a rudimentary toilet (a hole in the concrete floor connected to plumbing) is built in yet another room.
“It costs no more than $200 to make those renovations,” says Yo. “That’s not much to us, but you should see the smiles on the people’s faces when their homes are transformed.”
In addition to his work with Agapé, “I had some other great opportunities,” he says. “I visited a local Catholic seminary and helped with some computer security issues. I went to the largest university in East Java, reviewed its website, gave a speech and met with the university president, who had studied at the University of Victoria.”
Yo notes that the training and advice he received for Leaving for Change stood him in good stead in Indonesia.
“I was told to always bring a tie and always be ready to give a speech because international visitors are often invited to speak when abroad. It was true in Nepal, and it was true in Indonesia.”
When he posted a photo on his travel blog that showed him sitting in white shirt and tie with the university president, his mother commented that she was “beaming with pride.”
At the end of Yo’s two-week volunteer stint, the people he’d been working with and teaching asked him to stay longer. “They were very eager students,” he says. He turned down their request by saying: “OK, but you’ll have to phone my wife and tell her. They understood that I needed to go.”
Yo’s wife, Jennifer, stayed behind to care for their two daughters. Next trip, he says, she’ll go with him. “Her support has made this all possible. I call her Saint Jennifer. She’s been amazing.”
To read more about Yo’s journey, go to www.sean.onleave.ca. For information about the Agapé Social Foundation, visit www.agapesf.org. He also welcomes questions at syo@uoguelph.ca or Ext. 54315.