SOWETO, South Africa (CNN) -- It's late Sunday morning inside a cavernous Salvation Army Church in Soweto, South Africa. Services, complete with African and traditional music, have just finished and a catchy drum beat with a distinctly American hip-hop sound is coming from the stage.



Laura DiFilippi, 12, gets ready to board the bus in Bushwick, Brooklyn, to go to the airport.



The group of teenagers dancing around the drums is 8,000 miles and an 18-hour plane ride from their New York home. They are mostly from Bushwick, Brooklyn -- a community of about 109,000 people only five miles from Manhattan.



For some of these kids, it's their first time away from home.



Unfamiliar with Bushwick? It's mostly a working class neighborhood where families have often struggled.



For years it was a community with a thriving drug trade, severely under-achieving schools, extreme poverty and a staggering rate of teenage pregnancy. It was ravaged by fires and looting during the summer of 1977 and hit hard by the crack epidemic in the 1980s.



Bushwick is recovering now, but half of the children under age 18 still live below the poverty line. A quarter of the adults never make it past the ninth grade and more than half never graduate from high school.



The children on this trip to South Africa are what educators and social workers call "at-risk" -- at risk of having babies as teenagers; at risk of never finishing high school or achieving their dreams; at risk of never knowing the world beyond their neighborhood.



Thirty of these children, between the ages of 12 to 16, have been paired up with college-aged mentors and brought to South Africa by Malaak Compton-Rock, the wife of comedian Chris Rock. She brought them to volunteer -- to serve the impoverished and the AIDS orphans in this country with the highest HIV-infected population in the world. Watch the kids' video diaries from South Africa »



Compton-Rock has carved her own niche in espousing service -- giving back. She often quotes her mentor Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children's Defense Fund: "Service is the rent we pay for living."



The South Africa trip is Compton-Rock's brainchild -- to broaden the horizons of young teens and give them perspective on their own lives.  Watch: The kids witness devastating effect of AIDS in South Africa »



"I believe by traveling you open up your life," Compton-Rock tells a crowd gathered for a press conference the morning after the group has arrived. "You don't think locally, you start to think globally and internationally and I think it gives you a sense of confidence."



She also wants the children to know, "that in the United States of America, even in Bushwick, we have certain services that I want the children to understand that they need to take advantage of."



Compton-Rock is talking about access to free public education, food, knowledge and social mobility -- elusive things for South Africa's impoverished and particularly so for 1.4 million AIDS orphans there.



One of the mentors on this trip is 20-year-old Alicia Gerald.



"I know that in my own experience," Alicia says. "Just having someone put their hand out and say 'I believe that you can be great,' has really helped me rise to those expectations."  Photos: Meet some of the kids »



Alicia is from Bedford-Stuyvesant, a troubled community just blocks away from Bushwick. It's also where Compton-Rock's husband grew up.



Compton-Rock has required all of the children selected for the trip to sign one-year contracts to become "global ambassadors."



As ambassadors they are required to tell their friends and neighbors about their experiences -- through writing, blogging, photographs and speeches. The idea, Compton-Rock explains, is that if a child is given a unique opportunity, she or he, is "obligated to bore a hole and take someone through with you."



Among the children on Compton-
Who does this program help? What were kids required to do to become "global ambassadors"? Who spearheaded the mission to empower "at-risk" youth?
children, sign one-year contracts Malaak Compton-Rock,
question: Who does this program help?, answer: children, | question: What were kids required to do to become "global ambassadors"?, answer: sign one-year contracts | question: Who spearheaded the mission to empower "at-risk" youth?, answer: Malaak Compton-Rock,