team 3: kinda sorta max

As you can see, we have a great group of young people going to Uganda to help out at the orphanage this year. Isn’t it inspiring and so hopeful?

There is one young person who was part of the group last year who won’t be returning this year. I wish he were! He was such an energetic, enthusiastic and helpful team member. OK, so I’m just a little biased – he’s my son.

Last year Max brought his sense of humor, his compassion and his mad skills as a drummer to St. Mary Kevin’s. He loves drumming, both as a member of the USC Trojan Marching Band and as fellow-drummer and teacher at the orphanage.




This year, he has found a cool way to reach out and work with the children, even though he's not making the trip.

When his writing professor, Mark Marino, recently issued a class assignment revolving around “service”, Max suggested a collaborative project with the kids in Uganda. This is the letter he sent to the director of the orphanage:

"My class, made up of 20 students, would like to facilitate collaboration among students who are geographically separated. We
think that picking out a project and working on it together would be a great way to have fun, befriend students from different
schools/cities/countries, and make something really neat. We intend to make a website to help accomplish our goal of bringing classes together.

But before we inspire others to do such a project, we need to try it ourselves. So, we'd love if you would allow us to work with some of our friends at SMK! The idea for our project is to have a group of kids work together to write a script for a short movie/play. Then, they'd send the script to us, and we'd act it out, videotape it and then send it back to the kids! In order to help narrow the scope of the script, we've come up with some guidelines that could give the kids some tangible ideas. We've recorded our thoughts and posted them as a short video online that you can look at."

This letter and the video (along with a written proposal) has been sent. Plans are now underway for the children to participate in the assignment, and both groups of young people – at USC and at SMK – are excited to work together, even though their connections will be strictly limited to cyberspace. Watch the video here.

The writing class hopes to have the collaborative piece completed in a few weeks. I’ll be sure to share the finished product here!