A little over three years ago, Joyce Mitchell, a counsellor at Nanaimo District Secondary School called me to ask if I would drop by the school to talk to Michelle Fries, one of her students. Michelle had saved over $1,000 and wanted me to take it to Zimbabwe with me and use it to help AIDS orphans.

When we met, I encouraged her to keep her money and use it to go to the people she wanted to help, roll up her sleeves and get involved personally. That's exactly what she has done.

When I met her on the street the other day, she had just returned from a three month visit to Brazil where she spent most of her time volunteering to help save the Atlantic Rain Forest. After spending ten days at home, she left to volunteer on an organic farm in France.

You can tell that she is passionately committed to environmental causes, and that's just one area of interest for her. Over the years she helped to organize, or organized on her own, a variety of fundraising and awareness events for both local and international causes. She has also been an active member of the Nanaimo Interact Club, a high school Rotary Club.

In Brazil she volunteered with the Iracambi Atlantic Rainforest Research and Conservation Centre (http://www.iracambi.com/english/). In return for room and board, she got her hands dirty helping them move toward achieving their mission statement, "To work with our community to make conservation of the rainforest more attractive than its destruction."

Iracambi operates and promotes what they call an "agro farm" where they make a living from the land, while also preserving the biodiversity of the area. One example of this concept is shade grown coffee, where coffee, bananas and a variety of other crops that provide a canape are grown on a shared piece of land.

Only eight percent of the original Atlantic rain forest remains mainly in widely scattered patches. Iracambi also works to create "forest corridors". These are replanted bio-diverse corridors a mile or more wide that connect these patches.

After three months, Michelle returned home speaking Portuguese and empowered knowing she had made a positive difference while learning about a new culture. She also had enough money in her jeans to fly to France to volunteer on an organic farm, an opportunity she found through the World Wide Organization for Organic Farming (www.wwoof.org). These volunteer opportunities usually provide free room and board, so they make travelling affordable.

Once again her goal while in France is to experience a new culture and language, meet new young people and, at the same time, make a contribution toward building a better world.

When she returns this fall, Michelle will probably attend the Malaspina campus of VIU, but a university in Quebec is also a possibility since she plans on being trilingual (English, French and Portuguese) by this fall.

Eventually she wants to become a teacher. Lucky kids.