Happy Move Global Youth Volunteers is one of Hyundai Motor Group’s CSR (corporate social responsibility) campaigns. At the beginning of this year, the 24th class of Happy Move visited India’s Chennai, China’s Hainan and Bangladesh’s Matarbari. Notably, the visit to Bangladesh is all the more meaningful in that Happy Move volunteers visit the country for the first time and Hyundai E&C’s construction site is located there.
Matarbari Government Primary School has been under refurbishment by Hyundai E&C since last year. When Happy Movers arrived, the final stage of the reconstruction was in full swing to transform the school into a place where children feel free to study and play. we, volunteers, rolled our sleeves up to give a finishing touch to the transformation: we first decorated inner and outer walls of the school by drawing murals. All the volunteers willingly joined painting various murals to help children grow their own dream.
On the fifth day, we were given a chance to teach the local children whom we became familiar with during the volunteering activities. When we entered the classroom, the children looked a little tense. But they got relaxed soon and did their best to follow what we prepared for them. With wishes that they would like to laugh with their family or grow into a scientist, they wrote down their dream in a note and put it in a lucky bag during the class. In the poor environment where 43 percent of the population is illiterate, they try to keep their dream alive, which made us look back our dream and hope which remained forgotten for long.
Matarbari Island is not simply where Happy Movers visit to conduct volunteering activities. It will be remembered by Happy Movers as a meaningful place in which we realized how big changes could be brought about by the power of “being together.”