22-year-old sociology senior, Daniel Gasparini’s most recent visit to South Africa in June was more than a summer vacation trip.

Daniel Gasparini’s family ties connect back to South Africa and drive his desire to perform community service in some of the most remote and poor parts of the country.

He said it was the exile of his mother’s side of the family during the 1970s that gave him a reason to travel to the country to give back to the communities his mother came from.

“My grandfather, Ernle Young, was a part of the anti-apartheid movement and when the South African government found out, they actually exiled my grandfather and his kids in 1974,” Gasparini said.

Daniel’s mother, Jenny, said that after visiting the country during a family trip in 2011, he was motivated to come back for internship purposes.

“We had been back visiting my family in 2011 and he fell in love with the country,” Jenny Gasparini said. “He had talked about going and he took it upon himself to write the essay (for the internship).”

Daniel Gasparini travelled to the country for a South African non-profit organization called Munna Ndi Nnyi, which assists children in need.

By living in close quarters with his village family in the Limpopo Province that borders Zimbabwe and Botswana, Daniel Gasparini said the experience opened his eyes to the way people lived in the village.

“I was immersed in the Venda culture in the village, so I was living with the family for two months,” Daniel Gasparini said. “I had to pick my own food, kill my own food and electricity was an issue, but they are some of the most happiest people I have ever met.”

The internship required working within the community to educate the children about youth development and empowerment because any social factor can jeopardize the children’s development into adolescence and adulthood, Gasparini said.

“The major reason these local children were orphaned was because one of their parents had died of HIV and/or AIDS and they are vulnerable because of high exposure rates,” Daniel Gasparini said. “(They were) vulnerable because they don’t have access to food; vulnerable because crime rates are high.”

He said he also had to train the staff to teach and take care of the children.

“A lot of these women, who grew up during apartheid, the highest they went to in school was grade eight and they didn’t receive any formal education in their youth so even to sit down with them was hard,” Daniel Gasparini said.

Although teaching the children was beneficial to them, Daniel Gasparini said getting his students to focus was a difficult task.

“Giving the kids lessons was also extremely hard because the kids were only thinking about the food that we were going to give them because they smell it cooking in the kitchen,” he said. “It was hard. Trying to engage them in an activity was a task on its own.”

Despite the difficulty of teaching his class, Daniel Gasparini built a relationship with the kids by developing sports programs and purchasing new toys for the children to play with.

The adviser for The Foundation for Professional Development, Andrew Medina-Marino, said Daniel Gasparini was able to adjust well during his internship.

“Daniel was fantastic to work with, very laid back and he was very open to experiencing living in rural South Africa, which is very different from rural America,” Medina-Moreno said. “It was not easy living, but I think that Daniel handled it very gracefully.”

Jenny Gasparini said she’s proud of Daniel traveling to South Africa for his internship.

“I was extremely impressed and proud of him when he got in and it meant a lot personally that he had wanted to go back and find his roots and my upbringing had influenced him like that,” Jenny Gasparini said.

Daniel Gasparini said after returning to the U.S. in August, the experience changed his life and he will consider going back to study in South Africa.

“I would like to do my master’s there in Pretoria and go back and spend two weeks travelling and going back to the places I have visited and also popping in to the (non-profit organization) to do some more work and going back to visit my village family,” Daniel Gasparini said.

Shannan Osrin can be reached at [email protected]