Jordan Hattar wasn’t like most teenagers – he didn’t spend the summer after his high school graduation surfing or playing beach volleyball.
Instead, he took the trip of a lifetime and went straight to south Sudan to help build a medical clinic and teach at a school for the village of Malek.
“It was kind of like a shock,” he said. “I went from my last day of high school to being in Africa the next few days.”
The idea came to Hattar during his freshman year of high school when his teacher showed his class the genocide going on in Darfur.
“It made me realize that it is a global world,” he said. “What’s more important than being a voice for the people who don’t have a voice?”
Hattar pursued his dreams during his junior and senior year of high school by fundraising, contacting different people and gathering up resources for his trip.
Instead of attending the first semester of college, Hattar, now a sophomore international studies major at Cal State Long Beach, spent more than a month in Malek helping and becoming acquainted with the locals.
“It wasn’t just a humanitarian trip for me to see what it is like,” he said. “I wanted to learn their greatest joys and struggles. I wanted to know their biggest needs and how I can help them decrease those needs.”
Though his stay was supposed to last for six months, his trip was cut short after he became ill with a stomach infection. Still, he said he created a lasting connection with the locals.
“I became accepted in their community,” he said. “I wasn’t a foreigner to them. I became a part of their village.”
Hattar said that one woman in the community even promised that they will give dowry for his future wife when he gets married.
He said that the gesture showed “they truly appreciated [him] being there.”
After returning to the United States, Hattar went on a speaking tour to different colleges and high schools to show what students can do to help change the world.
“The message I want to give to students is that you don’t need a specific skill to make a difference,” he said. “I made my trip happen based on knowing it could happen.”
The trip motivated him to put together a trailer for a documentary he is planning on starting this summer during his return to Sudan.
The documentary will feature the village of Malek and its people. It will aim to bring awareness regarding the struggles, living conditions, medical and educational needs of the Sudanese.
“I was inspired to get a documentary together to show the health condition and education,” he said. “I want to show what it is like. Right now, one in seven children don’t make it to the age of five in south Sudan.”
Hattar was also selected to speak at the Clinton Global Initiative University Conference.
The conference was started by former President Bill Clinton to “inspire, connect, and empower a community of global leaders to forge solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges.”
Hattar will be going to Washington, D.C. on March 30 to present his “Commitment to Action,” which is to bring consciousness to the challenges that numerous developing worlds are facing.
He will be presenting in front of several prominent guests including Clinton, Usher and Jon Stewart.
“What I’m hoping to get out of this is to have the corporation and prominent people help students with their project,” he said. “I want to show them how we would like to change the world and how we want their resources to be used.”
Hattar said that more people, especially students, should step up and acknowledge the world around them.
“If we believe we can make a difference, we will,” Hattar said.
He said people have many misconceptions about developing worlds, such as the people are not working hard enough or they are primitive and barbaric.
“Our world is all one,” Hattar said. “We tend to view people as the other, but really, our singularity in the world is greater than our differences.”
Hattar said he wants to greatly change the way people are living in poor countries, and in doing so, he wants to get other people to join him.
“It’s hard to sit here in a university knowing things are going on in countries like Syria,” he said. “But I know, with my education, I can do more.”
In the future, Hattar said he wants to continue his education and do more philanthropy. He is also interested in pursuing journalism.
“At times, I want to be the president of the U.S. to change how the world takes things,” he said. “But if that doesn’t work, I want to be on the grassroots movement sides of thing. I want to be an extension of what Gandhi and Martin Luther King preached.”