Ryan Briggs has always been interested in helping people. That’s what drew the Jasper man to the social work program at Red Deer College. And now, that’s what is taking him overseas.

Briggs is part of a small group of Red Deer College social work students who will spend the next six weeks in rural South Africa, supporting an Edmonton-based NGO in their field work in the community of Ndawana.

Shortly before leaving Canada last weekend, Briggs took a moment to speak to the Fitzhugh about his upcoming trip, and said he was excited to be headed to Africa for his practicum.

“It’s pretty exciting,” he said. “I haven’t really travelled much, I mean, I went to Hawaii for a week once, but this is going to be amazing.”

All social work students in the diploma program in Red Deer have to do a praticum before earning their qualification, and while it could have been more straightforward to complete this requirement on Canadian soil, Briggs and the others involved in the “Voices Unite” project were determined not to let a little bit of bureaucratic difficulty stand in their way.

“They (Red Deer College) said you can do it, but it’s going to be you guys who are responsible for organizing everything and if it doesn’t work out, then you’ll have to make up the practicum hours,” Briggs recalled. $22,000 worth of fundraising later and the group was good to go.

Initially, the intention of Briggs and Voices United was to pursue a project in the Darfur region of Sudan. One of the group’s members, Moses Bornyi, is a Sudanese refugee who came to Canada just four years ago. The group was eager to follow his lead, but security concerns made it impossible to continue down that road.

Instead, the team came into contact with Edzimkulu, a small organization based in Edmonton that works with AIDS and HIV-affected families and children in the KwaZulu Natal province of South Africa. 

“Their main focus is to provide relief and support,” said Briggs. “There are 12 villages around the area, and six students, so each one of us will be responsible for two villages.”

The specific focus of the Red Deer College group will be to help AIDS orphans and other victims of the pandemic to obtain official documentation. Without recognized identification like a birth certificate or parent’s death certificate, it can be close to impossible for people to obtain assistance from the South African government.

“There are lots of grant programs and loans that people could be taking advantage of,” Briggs said. “So we’re going in to help them do that.”

Briggs spent time during the first year of his diploma program working at a homeless shelter in Red Deer, but knows that this experience will pack a much heftier emotional punch. He’s been doing what he can to prepare.

“It might seem funny, but I think the best way to prepare is just to watch movies, documentaries and read books,” he said. “I just watched Hotel Rwanda and I’ve read Stephen Lewis’ new book “Race Against Time” which is all about the AIDS situation in Africa, but there’s not much that will prepare me for what we’ll see there.”

As social workers in training, Briggs and the rest of the group had been meeting regularly to discuss their feelings and apprehensions before the trip, and will continue with the regular debriefing sessions during and after the trip itself.

“We do a lot of work in the program about how we feel and how other people feel, so we’re paying a lot of attention to that,” Briggs said.

Once he returns from South Africa in mid-June, Briggs will work in Jasper for the remainder of the summer, before presenting a full report on the experience and, hopefully, moving on to the University of Calgary’s Bachelor of Social Work program. Some of the instructors at Red Deer College have high hopes that Voices Unite will be able to take their tale on tour after returning to Canada, but Briggs isn’t so sure.

“They want us to go around to other colleges after we get back, but we’ll all be so busy, I don’t know if that’s going to happen.”