“The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” — Maya Angelou

That would be the case for most people, who have a place of their own that they can call home.  However, for some, who either don’t have a home of their own, or had one and are escaping a war or political persecution in their homeland, the concept of home can be abstract and remote.

I am an American, but my entire childhood I grew up in Hong Kong because of my dad’s work.  When I visited family and friends in the summer, I was clueless about many cultural references.  When I was back in Hong Kong, I longed to engage in the busy city of Hong Kong, with all the sights, smells, and sounds of this bustling place.  But the cacophony of senses and noises remained a mystery for me.

The idea for this charity sprouted from a visit I made with my mom to her childhood neighborhood in San Diego, where she first moved as an immigrant from Vietnam. In 1975, my mother’s family arrived from Vietnam and was placed in Camp Pendleton, where Marines practice land drills. They lived in tents and ate in mess halls set up for Vietnamese refugees. Fortunately, a family from a Baptist church sponsored her family, allowing them to move off the camp; they received the support of a family willing to take in an immigrant family. She then lived in six homes from ages 6 to 17 years old. Recently, seeing her childhood homes struck a chord with me. Her neighborhood was at the epicenter of where arriving immigrants from Southeast Asia first found homes in San Diego. Today you can still see Vietnamese owned small businesses but now there is a new wave of immigrants, this time from North Africa. In time these immigrants will turn San Diego into their home too. But they can use some help to adjust. I realized how hard it must be for people to start from scratch without basic necessities that we take for granted and how temporary one’s life can feel when one must move because of economic or security concerns.

I realised how hard it must be for people to arrive in this country and not have the basic infrastructure and thought perhaps a phone, one of today’s most basic necessities, would help them. Based on what I saw around me, I had an idea to start a charity that would collect, wipe clean, and donate old phones to people that really needed them. I put together a website, placed collection boxes around my school, asked the school administrators, family, and friends to donate devices or money to help refurbish broken or damaged phones.

I am now a senior at Cathedral Catholic High School.  This non-profit, RevivalTech, is something that I started.  I already feel it has connected me to a group of displaced families or individuals, and like me, it was unfortunate circumstances in their countries, or in their families, that made them become displaced.

After starting to place phones with several charities around our community I found out that one of the phones I donated to a school that educates un-housed children, similar in age to me, went to a student who wakes up in Tijuana, every day, at 3am, crosses the border on foot, then takes a trolley to downtown San Diego to get to school—a safe place. Several other phones went to recent political refugees coming from Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Iraq—war-torn regions with millions of displaced people. I am proud that these phones will enable these people, whose stories I just barely scratched the surface of, to talk with loved ones, arrange schooling, housing, jobs, pay bills and have some connectivity to their new communities. I hope that my small act of getting a phone into the hands of those in need will help get them started in their new lives.

I can identify with the groups of displaced immigrants, because I too, have had a hard time finding my voice.  Now that I have had the chance to reach out to my parents’ colleagues, community members, and friends, I am excited to have collected dozens phones to distribute to this, sometimes overlooked, group and I am very eager to find out their stories too.  I hope you will hear our stories and contribute what you can to my cause.  If I can increase a little awareness for the often unspoken journey of others, I would feel proud that our voices can be heard.