Who We Are.

My name is Alexander Etzkorn. I am 26 years old and attended UC Irvine where I received a degree in History in 2007. After college, I began working as an EMT where I have worked in specialized psychiatric transport, 911, and in an emergency room as part of the cardiac and respiratory arrest team.

While my parents have been involved for almost a decade, I personally became involved with the Project Vietnam Foundation in 2010 when I attended the 2010 Summer Camp. This year, I am acting as the Summer Camp Student Leader along with my longtime friend Zachary Stone.

I come into this year's service camp with two goals: one goal for the high school and college students attending the camp, and one goal for myself.

Being the student leader, I only want what is best for the students attending this service camp. The majority of our students currently attend high school or college. These years for the students are vital in our development from children to adults as we attempt to discover who we are, what we stand for, and what we want to do with our lives. This service camp removes the students from their comfort zone of computers, video games, Facebook, and anything else that distracts us from what is important in life. I want the students to realize that we are capable of amazing things when we put our blood, sweat, and tears into something we are passionate about. In short, I want our students to realize that it is not our clothes, our cars, or how many friends we have on Facebook that defines who we are as people. In reality, it is our capacity for love, our ability to give, and the efforts that we take to make the world a better place that truly defines who we are.

Personally, I have a single goal for myself in this summer trip. I want to push myself and invest every part of myself towards a singular purpose: to help in any way I can to improve the health and quality of life for the people of Vietnam. If I am able to make even a single child's life better in any way, I will gladly donate two weeks of my life to that purpose.

Mother Teresa once said, "What we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But if that drop were not in the ocean, I think the ocean would be less because of that missing drop." While the work that we do on this trip may last for two short weeks, the ripples that our work creates from that single drop in a vast ocean will carry on long after we have left.

- Alexander Etzkorn