Helping Iraqi kids is all in a day’s work for teens

Teens do odd-jobs for charity in annual fundraiser that this year focuses on children in Iraq

Nov 7, 2012

Some 20,000 high school students got the day off from school today in order to help young people in Iraq.

The annual Operation Dagsværk (All in a day’s work) is a one-day charity event that involves students doing odd jobs in order to raise 200 kroner each for a foreign cause. In 2011, students raised over six million kroner to support a Peruvian charity working to protect the rights of that country’s aboriginal groups. The aim this year was to help the youth of Iraq “have the right to be young”.

To accomplish that goal, Operation Dagsværk partnered with an organisation called Cross Cultures Project Association (CCPA). Since 1999, CCPA has used sports as a way to create better relationships and build bridges between people in living in conflict areas. Part of the way it does that is through funding football clubs that allow the young people of countries that have been split by conflict to compete together and forget about their divisions.

Operation Dagsværk is administered by the nation’s high schools and has existed since 1985. According to organisation spokesperson Mette Fierstein, the project is selected and voted on by the students.

Students participate in all kinds of different activities to support the cause. Students can either find their own jobs – such as selling cakes outside train stations or busking – or be assigned one by Operation Dagsværk

Four students who chose to have the organisation assign them a job were Jakob Coff Andersen, Kasper Winther, Fredrik Fleischer and Kasper Dam Hansen, who all attend Frederiksborg Gymnasium.

They were assigned to help an area resident with yard work.

“It’s really fun,” said Fleischer. “You definitely get your share of fresh air, and it is good physical work.”

All of the boys agreed that Operations Dagsværk was a good project and said everyone who could should participate in helping a good cause.

The author of this article is a first-year student at Frederiksborg Gymnasium and the daughter of Copenhagen Post journalist Ray Weaver. She wrote this article as her Operation Dagsværk project.