Courtesy of Nittai Malchin

Paly Junior Nittai Malchin poses with a group of students in Haiti. Malchin visited schools with his father where they created a program to teach children to use technology.

When the earthquakes struck Haiti on Jan. 12, 2010, millions of people all over the world rushed to help one of the world’s poorest nations by sending food, money and first aid supplies. Palo Alto High School junior Nittai Malchin responded in his own way; By founding his own non-profit initiative, OneLove Advocates.

OneLove Advocates is an organization aimed at improving Haitian education. Malchin decided to focus on learning to help enable the youth to create a better future in Haiti.

“I essentially feel as though [education is] the most important aspect of the rebuilding effort,” Malchin said. “The infrastructure in Haiti before the earthquake was shaky at best and the recent earthquake has presented an opportunity to leap-frog all of the issues that existed beforehand. All of the locals that we talked to told us that they felt as though the most flaring issue was that the community is underdeveloped.”

Malchin has also been working with schools run by the Foundation for Progress and Development, known as Prodev. Prodev is an organization that aims to strengthen Haiti by empowering its youth.

“At first I just made a blog where I posted news about Haiti and the relief efforts there,” Malchin said. “But after talking about it with my dad, we realized that we had a connection in Haiti [with] Daniel Kedar who runs Prodev and that we would be able to actually travel there and do some hands-on work.”

During their trip to Haiti, Malchin and his father, Omer Malchin, worked at the 14 different Prodev tent schools providing various volunteer services.

“It was great to be there with Nittai and support him in his initiative in any way I could,” O. Malchin said. “As a parent, you see and talk to your kids daily dealing with the day-to-day life, but then when you spend time together in a very different context, you learn to see what your kid became, and this is very exciting and a reason to be proud.”

At one school, Malchin helped set up a soccer program for the students by bringing a ball and T-shirts. In another town, Malchin and his father set up their own program to help Haitian students learn how to better use modern technology.

Malchin and his father bought a computer and printer and found a local Haitian technician who was willing to travel to each of the Prodev schools to teach the students what a computer is and how to operate one.

“[After the trip], the whole feeling regarding the blog changed and I got much more excited about the work I was doing,” Malchin said. “We sent out fundraising letters and raised almost $15,000.”

Besides working at the school, Malchin did other volunteer work with Prodev on his trip. He went to a medical care center to help evaluate the children for a preschool that Prodev was starting.

Malchin maintains a website, oneloveadvocates.org. On the website, Malchin has an information section about OneLove Advocates, a blog where he documents his relief efforts and news about Haiti, a fundraising section and contact information.

Malchin adds new entries to the blog every few days. In one recent post, he uploaded a video of a choir, made up of local Haitian children, performing a short concert for Malchin and his father on their visit to Haiti. In another, he describes how he brought drawings from three different elementary school classes in Palo Alto to Haiti to distribute to the students in Haiti.

In return, the children in the classes in Haiti drew pictures for their student counterparts in Palo Alto, to create a much-desired connection between the classes and countries.

This summer, Malchin plans to visit and do volunteer work in Haiti again with Los Altos High School juniors Omri Maor and Drew Eller, who he attended high school with during his freshman year.

“Nittai and I were both involved with raising awareness for a youth home in Israel, called Beit Hashanti, in middle school, and [Malchin, Eller and I all] served as board members on the South Peninsula Jewish Community Teen Foundation,” Maor said.

While the itinerary is not quite nailed down, Malchin plans to visit several schools in Port-au-Prince to check on the computer program he helped establish and bring supplies and soccer equipment to schools. They also plan to run a full-day soccer lesson at one of the schools.

“It will be a pretty fun experience too, to work with people and hopefully make a profound impact, even if it is only on a small scale,” Eller said. “Together we are already working on donations and drives to collect and buy used and new soccer and sports equipment to give to the Haitian youth.”

In addition to helping to improve the school system in Port-au-Prince, Malchin, Maor and Eller plan to provide aid to a small village, Mon Bouton, located outside of Port-au-Prince.

“It isn’t accessible by car, so we will have to walk some 15 miles once the road ends to get there,” Malchin said. “At Mon Bouton, the people live in extreme poverty and need help to even get the most basic living essentials, such as food, water and shelter. This should be a unique experience and give us a different perspective than that of the city.”

“I think it is going to be an incredibly powerful experience,” Maor said. “It will be difficult, but valuable, to try to take in how bad it really is there. I hope that seeing how destitute these people are with my own eyes will inspire me, in some way or another, to try to make a difference and help those that are less fortunate than I.”