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Laverne Stewart

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Rebecca Tremblay and her mother, Karen Balloch-Tremblay, will soon travel to Kenya on a volunteer vacation. She will leave early in the new year as the winner of the Reach Out with Red Rose program. Part of the contest includes a $250,000 contribution to ONEXONE.

This organization helps to provide clean water, hunger relief, education and health-care in developing countries.

Tremblay has a passion for working with disadvantaged children. She qualified for this contest after she wrote a 200-word essay about what she is doing to make a positive difference in the world.

Then she garnered enough online votes to make it to the contest's top 10. The top 10 entries then moved on to the next round of voting. The three entries with the highest votes were then reviewed by the Red Rose judging panel.

Tremblay, who had the highest number of online votes, has been named the winner of this volunteer vacation in Kenya for seven days, where she will work with children in need.

She is very excited about the trip and the experiences she will have while she is there.

"They sent me an email to let me know I'd won. I said, 'Yeah, I got it!' I had a good feeling about it. I was really excited. I am really looking forward to the project.'"

Tremblay has a degree in international development and she adores working with children. She has volunteered her time to help kids in this city as well as in Nicaragua and Belize.

She has long dreamed of becoming a volunteer with African children. This trip to Kenya, she says, is the next step toward a career in working with kids who need assistance, support and love.

Tremblay will blog about her experiences while she is in Kenya and her trip will be filmed to create a documentary that will be screened at the ONEXONE Gala during the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival.

After the week-long trip she will return to Canada. A few days later she will fly to Burkina Faso in West Africa where she will work with a theatre company.

Tremblay will help to write and present plays about HIV/AIDS prevention there. That internship will last three months. When it is finshed she will come back to Canada with plans to look for a full-time job with a humanitarian organization or a university.

Fredericton parks and trees specialists participate in exchange with Vietnam

Employees with the city's parks and trees division are helping their Vietnamese counterparts make improvements in the city of Ninh Binh. These trips have taken place through the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, which is a branch of the Canadian International Development Agency.

The partnership program establishes relationships and practical exchanges between cities in Canada and those in developing countries who request assistance.

This city's employees were there to help the city of Ninh Binh with such things as horticulture and park planning, street tree planting and pruning, park and green space litter management. Over the long term this will improve the quality of life in that area, says Julie Baker, the city's horticulturist, who participated in two trips to Vietnam.

The first trip happened in March and the most recent one happened a few weeks ago. There for 12 days, they worked with a young translator who helped them to share their expertise with their Vietnamese counterparts.

"They are so accepting and keen to learn other people's points of view. You really feel you are helping when you are there. I felt that everything we had to say was seen as helpful."

When the Vietnamese participants in this exchange program came to Fredericton, they were extremely impressed with the beauty of this city. Baker says they were enthralled with the little things that we take for granted, like our maple trees.

"They carried maple leaves around with them the whole time they were here and I am not kidding. There is no traffic here compared to the traffic in the cities in Vietnam."

The Fredericton team gave a presentation of what Fredericton looks like and they were very impressed by what they saw in those photos, she says.

"They said just seeing the photos of the St. John River was like a watching a dream.

"They have a river in Ninh Binh which is very similar to Fredericton except it is used for commerce so there are big barges coming in, picking up and dropping off coal."

The Fredericton team experienced many cultural differences while they were in Vietnam.

One of the things that Baker says she noticed was the healthy Vietnamese diet. Most people eat a lot of fresh vegetables and no one eats junk food.

Laverne Stewart is a staff writer at The Daily Gleaner. If you've got an interesting tidbit to share, please contact her at stewart.laverne@dailygleaner.com. Did You Hear? appears every Friday.