Living as a North American Jew who has attended private school all my life has been all I could wish for in an upbringing. I hear about the genocide in Darfur, poverty in South America and terror in the Middle East, and I thank God that I do not have to experience that firsthand, that I am privileged to live freely and safely at all times. This past March, however, taught me that while being in my situation is a fantastic thing, turning my back on the struggles of our surrounding world would be a shame.

For one week last March, I was incredibly privileged to be part of a small delegation of nine students from my school, Gann Academy, participating in a community service trip to El Salvador. The trip, made possible by American Jewish World Service, took us to a small, impoverished town called Ciudad Romero. Ciudad was beautiful, blooming with mango trees and bright flowers as the cows, dogs, pigs and children peacefully shared the narrow dirt roads.

On the one hand, the week was outstandingly fun and gratifying. I was given the opportunity to till the soil of El Salvadorian farms, dig the foundation for a community center and learn of a new culture that I had never experienced before. Yet the trip was more than just a week of fun in the sun. As the week slowly passed, our awareness of what this community was really going through quickly grew. We noticed that the youth roaming the streets did so without shoes, and that the ribs of the dogs next to them were visible through their malnourished bodies.

Throughout my journey, the children’s suffering went straight to my gut. After all, I too am a child. The relationship my delegation and I developed with these adolescents was absolutely incredible. The children of Ciudad Romero and my delegation played soccer together, danced together and spoke about life together as the language barrier immediately collapsed. I was moved by the many similarities we shared despite our cultural differences. Yet a great barrier still stood between us: While I, in America, live knowing that I have every opportunity ahead of me and every educational door open to me, the children in El Salvador can hardly say they have any.

In El Salvador, the government pays for grades one through nine. Once the children graduate ninth grade, however, the potential students of Ciudad Romero and other grass-roots towns similar to it are unable to pay the many expenses of high school. It pained us to know that these children will grow to be in the same hopeless situation their parents are in now, unable to provide for their children’s needs.

So this past summer, I founded a fund that allocates high-school scholarships to potential and eligible adolescent students in Ciudad Romero and other similarly impoverished towns in El Salvador. I began the fund through the Foundation for Self Sufficiency in Central America, an American foundation that provides assistance to Ciudad Romero and its surrounding towns. I am currently planning two fundraisers, a week-long dollar drive in my school and a benefit a capella concert with local high schools and colleges, the combination of which I hope will help give the fund a foundation for success.

My experience in El Salvador and the many similarities I discovered among the teens of Ciudad Romero and me—which are only separated by our family income—was extraordinarily powerful for me. It has motivated me to start this fund and has given me the confidence that I can help save the world, one town at a time.

Nadav Slovin is 17 years old and lives in Worcester, Mass. He’s a senior at Gann Academy in Waltham and president of the New England Region of USY. He loves Israel and plans on making aliyah after college, where he’ll hopefully practice his love for tikkun olam and Judaism.