“Many of my days / Are like heavy rains / Thunderstorms / And me at the middle of it all / Having nowhere to go,” writes Siphesihle, a teenager from South Africa, while Tamara, a 13-year-old from New York, writes, “I just want to graduate without getting shot or into drugs or losing my virginity before I turn 13.” Both girls shared their stories as part of The Do Write Campaign, a non-profit online literary magazine created by Madeleine Lippey ’14.
Founded in July 2011, the magazine aims to encourage the sharing of perspectives through art and writing with a global community. Lippey said that her goal for the magazine is to create a supportive network in which individuals can feel comfortable sharing the difficulties of their lives. The authors of the entries include teenagers from the United States, Asia, Africa and Europe, and the magazine has over 1,000 submissions of poetry, literature, photography and video.
Lippey became passionate about global issues after traveling to Dharamsala, India, where she worked with impoverished children during the summer before her ninth grade year.
Disturbed by the poverty and lack of sanitation she saw there, Lippey was determined to show this different world to her peers in her hometown of Greenwich, CT, and at Andover. She ended up creating a 12-minute documentary, “The Paradox of Our Age,” about her experience in Dharamsala.
Lippey’s film caught the attention of the Ubuntu Education Fund, whose members asked her to travel to South Africa to make a promotional film for them. The fund helps provide children in South Africa with healthcare as well as educational support in preparation for higher education and employment, according to its website.
Lippey said, “I met these incredible, incredible young women [in South Africa] who have been through a lot. A lot of them had been sexually abused, a lot of them have HIV and deal with problems at home like that. I found that a lot of them wrote poems and stories to unleash that pain and I felt like there was a really big demand in the global community for that.”
In a post on the Ubuntu Education Fund’s website, Lippey wrote, “The Ubuntu kids are inspired: they have dreams and plans, and brush away any notion that they might not come true. They give themselves a voice by simply taking the first step and speaking out.”
“These young people are going after their passions and are not willing to let the life they have been born into determine the life that they want to live,” Lippey added.
The children she met in South Africa inspired her to continue her global social justice work, which culminated in the formation of The Do Write Campaign as a way for their voices to be heard.
“Writing has always been a huge passion for me and has always been the way I connected with other people,” said Lippey. “In the 21st century we are all so focused on the Internet and Facebook as ways of communication, and I wanted to figure out a way to use the Internet as a catalyst for showing the power of the written word.”
Lippey uploads every entry submitted to her through email to the site.
“There was this incredible [post]. This kid was actually dying of cancer and he wrote about being sick of being sick, which really resonated with me,” she said.
Another one of the most striking posts Lippey has read so far was submitted by Soha Sanchorawala ’14.
“[Sanchorawala] wrote a really, really stirring [poem] called ‘Shotgun’ about women not being able to drive in Saudi Arabia. [It] was really powerful,” said Lippey.
Sanchorawala concludes “Shotgun” declaring, “[Oppression will] hinder those women, / but never for long, / oh you wait, / they’ll come back strong, / fighting with a fire burning bright / when they put their seatbelt on.”
In the coming years, Lippey hopes to expand her project. This summer, Lippey will be hosting a conference for The Do Write Campaign in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, which will feature guest speakers and several workshops and discussions on the social, political and cultural issues that affect young women in the world today.
Lippey has recruited friends from both Andover and Greenwich to help lead the conference.
She has fundraised $1,500 to help cover the travel costs and the Ubuntu Education Fund offered to hold the conference at their headquarters.
Looking forward, Lippey hopes to have at least 25 countries represented in an annual Do Write Conference.
