DANBURY—Over the summer many IHS students perform their community service hours by helping local organizations. One senior, Albert “AJ” Vitiello, went beyond his borders, both personal and physical, and travelled half way across the world to help another community with seemingly simple but important needs.
Mr. Vitiello spent three weeks in the village of Anloga, Ghana literally helping to build a school as well as minds. During his time in Anloga, situated in the Keta District of the Volta Region, Mr. VItiello taught a fifth grade class where students ranged from ages 12-18 years old. “This made me realize how lucky I am to receive the quality education I am getting and the encouragement from my teachers,” said Mr. Vitiello. “My service also consisted of making bricks for a primary school, and I carved IHS into one of the bricks I made,” he said. AJ noted that he wore his Immaculate uniform the first day of class to show the students that Americans wear uniforms too.
Seeing how precarious education is in other parts of the world really opened his eyes to how fortunate he was to receive a top-notch, modern education in a comfortable, modern school building with some of the best educators in the world. The experience also strengthened his faith.
“Although my village was mostly Muslim, my class made me a rosary at the end of the trip which was really special,” Mr. Vitiello said. “This strengthened my faith by showing how people from two completely different cultures and backgrounds can come together with God.”
Whenever he had free time, AJ enjoyed hiking to a waterfall, feeding the monkeys and shopping at an African market. “Of all the people I met in Ghana, I’ll probably miss a boy named Koshi the most. He was twenty years old and severely mentally disabled. He’d hang around our classroom all day and nobody would care, so I started to draw in the mud with him. By the end of the trip, I really connected with him and found it hard to say goodbye,” he said.
This was not AJ’s first trip out of the country; he travelled with the Diocese of Bridgeport to Poland to celebrate World Youth Day 2016.
Immaculate High School stresses the importance of community service and requires each student to perform at least 25 hours a year. At the end of the 2016-17 school year, IHS students had performed nearly 25,000 hours of community service, most of it in the communities of Fairfield County.
