Huntington Teen’s Hunger to Help Leads Him to Africa

Peter Greyshock is like any other 15-year-old. Well, almost.

He hangs out with friends, wears baggy pants and reveals a mouthful of braces when he grins. Among sports and Led Zeppelin posters on his bedroom walls, however, looms a giant poster of John F. Kennedy--and photographs of an African village.

The Huntington Beach teen is one of three students to have been chosen nationwide to participate in a 12-day study tour in Mozambique, where he will learn about life in poverty-stricken countries by talking to African youths, visiting former civil war refugees and even picking fruit off cassava bushes.

Peter, who leaves Wednesday for the tour, beat out more than 200 others who entered a competition sponsored by World Vision, an international Christian agency that provides hunger relief to people in Third World countries.

After participating in a 30-hour fast, or mock famine, at his church in March, Peter wrote a winning essay to World Vision describing his experiences.

“I’d never gone that long without food in my life,” said Peter, who is used to eating every few hours between surfing and boogie-boarding sessions with friends.

Peter and the other winners, two girls from North Carolina and Minnesota, will visit people who are accustomed to hunger.

The most important thing he will take with him is an open mind, he said.

“I’m not expecting anything because whatever I expect it to be, it won’t be like that,” he said in his comfortable home, where he lives with his mother, Connie, and brother, Steven, 13.

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“We live behind an Orange (County) curtain,” Peter said, leaning against a wall plastered with magazine cutouts of professional basketball and volleyball players. “We’re shielded a lot from what goes on in the world.”

But according to his mom, neither of her sons has been shielded from harsh realities.

The boys’ father died six years ago when Peter was 9. He grew up quickly and became “amazingly mature” for his age, she said.

“Peter is a rock,” she said.

Last year, he gave up his dream of playing college volleyball when he was found to have an arthritic condition in his legs that ruled out any future in a contact sport. He swims every day at a local athletic club instead.

Peter likes to recall what his hero, President Kennedy, once said: “It’s time for a new generation of leadership. . . . For there is a new world to be won.”

“Sometimes (teen-agers) get a really bad rap,” Peter said, adding that adults wrongly perceive teens as being a self-centered, partying bunch. “They are very concerned about what goes on in the world.”

If Kennedy were alive, he would be “in touch with my generation,” which is why Peter admires the former President.

Peter sees himself as an advocate of young people’s rights, he said in a conversation peppered with the “uhs” and “likes” of a typical Southern California teen-ager.

His interests are not unusual, he said. Given the opportunity, he insisted, many teens would like to go to Mozambique.

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After high school, Peter plans to attend a university in California and study law or social services. He will use his education, he said, to champion causes of the less fortunate.

Although he is open to learning from his African experience, Peter knows that his 30-hour hunger was fleeting and that he always had an escape if he wanted.

In his essay, he wrote:

“I know I cannot even begin to fathom what it feels like to go without food for days on end but now that I have somewhat of a realization of what it feels like, I know that I have no choice other than to do something about it.”