By KATH GANNAWAY
“IT’S that happy feeling you get when you are where you are where you want to be, doing exactly what you want to be doing.” At just 19 Anne-Marie Reddan is back in that place – working with the poor, sick and imprisoned in Uganda. The Healesville university student talked to the Mail’s Kath Gannaway about her passion, vision and life as a teenage volunteer before flying out to for a third time on Friday.
BRAVE or foolish?
“I don’t know… I guess it’s a fine line,” says Anne-Marie Reddan in a whirl-wind interview she has managed to fit in to a hectic last week in Australia before heading back to the village of Wairaka, about eight kilometres from Uganda’s second largest town Jinja.
Sitting in the Melbourne winter, rugged up in a beanie and scarf, the bubbly 19-year-old seems like any other Australian teenager.
Believe me, she is anything but typical.
Growing up in a Christian household in Buxton, she went primary school at Marysville before completing high school at Alexandra, Healesville, Mt Evelyn Christian School and Ringwood High.
She fell in love with Uganda and its people when she first visited at 16 with her family and returned for six months during a gap year in 2012 working initially with the Village of Hope project with Hope Builders.
“When the group left, I thought ‘what now’ and went out and tried to find different groups to work with and was able to work in so many areas including prostitute rehabilitation program, in a men’s prison, hospitals and schools,” Anne-Marie said.
“I am studying international development and wanted to get a wide range of experiences.
“I worked in Aids baby homes, with HIV women’s groups where I was able to set up links with a group in Australia called Positive Living and at one point was doing my own class in one of the schools,” she says as if none of this is particularly remarkable.
A passage from her blog in 2012 gives an insight into the reality of what Anne-Marie has faced in working with some of the world’s poorest communities in slums and remote villages.
She was asked to give a talk an HIV group… to give an encouraging message.
“They like you to give a message of pain, and how you got through it, something to give the women hope and allow them to trust you.
“Problem is, it makes me realise how lucky I am that (I have) never in my life experienced pain like these women,” she wrote.
Seeing the difference a cuddle can make was life-changing.
While she acknowledges that her passion and her journey is not for every teenager, or even every person, she believes everyone can contribute.
“Everyone has different skills. Some are good at building, but something like working at an Aids baby home, just holding these babies and showing them love … it’s something they never get because there are so many of them,” she adds with a degree of compassion that is almost as disarming as it is inspiring.
While there were times when she was ill and alone, she says she never felt danger.
“I always felt supported and safe; I never really felt brave, just like I was doing exactly what I wanted to be doing.
“Even when I got sick with malaria and typhoid, as terrible as it was being sick, all I remember is the people who came to visit me and make sure I was being looked after.
“It’s an amazing place, with amazing people. I don’t see how you could not see the best of everything in it.”
She rejects the idea that the problems of the world are so far away and so big that Australians can’t help.
“I was upset when I spoke to a high school here after I came back and no-one had even considered voluntary work.
“It made me upset that people are so focused on now, and not on the future.”
Her future has never been in doubt.
“I want to set up my own NGO when I’m finished university with a focus on empowering people to help themselves instead of having hand-outs.
“I want to provide ways for them to be sustainable.
“My goal for next year is to secure some land and keep studying so that in two years I can get a one-way ticket and stay for a while,” she added with a huge, beautiful smile that radiates a remarkable self-confidence, trust in those around her and joy at being where she is.
“When I think about Uganda, I’m just happy,” she says.
“They say home is where the heart is, and my heart is in Uganda.”
