23 July 2008
Volunteering
Many teens want to be involved in their communities, to use their energy and enthusiasm to help others. According to Youth Service America, an organization that partners with thousands of volunteer organizations and provides volunteer opportunities for young people in the United States, millions participated in the 2005 National Youth Service Day, making it the largest annual service event in the world. Young Americans tutored school children, registered new voters, educated their communities about good nutrition, and distributed HIV/AIDS prevention materials, among many other activities. As we see in the following essays, local and global events motivate American students to volunteer their time and energy to others.
The tsunami that struck South Asia the day after Christmas affected all Americans temporarily; however, it changed me permanently. Like countless people all over the world, my family and I were glued to the television in the hours after we first heard of this catastrophe. The thought of hundreds of thousands of people being wiped out within minutes was impossible for me to comprehend.
The name Chennai, India, which was frequently mentioned in news coverage, took on special meaning for my family. My mother had worked with a woman, Becky Douglas from Atlanta, who had recently founded an orphanage there. It suddenly struck my mother that the orphanage was right in the path of the tsunami. We learned from Becky by phone that all of the children in the orphanage, which was only a few hundred feet from the beach, were safe, but that nearly all the children in a nearby orphanage had been killed. We also learned that the economy of the fishing villages along the beach had been destroyed. When we asked what would be the best way of helping these people, Becky replied that the long-term welfare of the people would depend on their ability to return to the sea and fish. How much would that cost? Becky said that $11,000 would repair or replace the boats and nets of a village of 500 people. When I got home from our holiday break I spoke with our headmaster and asked his permission to have a fundraising drive at The Bullis School [a private school in a wealthy suburb of Washington, D.C.]. He gave his consent, and three days later I gave a presentation to the entire student body to kick off the campaign. On the first day of the campaign—and to our great surprise — we raised more than $4,000. By the end of the weekend we raised more than double the amount of our goal, and to date we have raised more than $100,000. One hundred percent of this money has gone directly to India.
Eight of my classmates and I, along with our headmaster and several other adults, decided to spend our spring break in India, with each of us paying our own way. What we learned in India far exceeded what we had learned from raising money.
We spent a week in Chennai, with half of our time devoted to the orphanage and school that had first gotten our attention, and the other half split among three colonies for people afflicted with leprosy. Working in the orphanage was easy for all of us, because the children were all adorable. Leaving them after such a short stay turned out to be quite difficult, and all of us cried as we left. Our work in the leprosy colonies was much more difficult, but in the end it was probably the most valuable. None of us had ever been around a patient with the disease. At first, we were afraid even to go near the residents of the colony, much less touch them. But our fears quickly vanished as we saw how excited these people were to have outsiders come to them in a spirit of love and help. We helped them with community needs, such as planting bananas to assist their efforts to become self-sufficient, but the best part was helping them individually. The highlight of my trip, and one of the most moving things of my life, was combing and braiding the hair of a woman who had lost both hands and both feet to leprosy. Until then, I never appreciated how much some simple gestures of love can do for someone else.
Lauren Elyse (Ellie) Prince, 16, grade 11, The Bullis School, Potomac, Maryland [http://www.bullis.org]
All young people must take a stand to become good stewards of the environment for the sake of future generations. From early childhood, I have experienced a developing interest in the environment. In the second grade, I joined the Ecology Club at my grammar school. We tried to beautify the school grounds and to oversee recycling projects. Even at the age of eight, I learned that this good stewardship of the environment is a necessity.
In late 2004, I presented a paper to the U.S. Forest Service's Centennial Congress in which I addressed the issue of what is needed to ensure that young people hear and answer the call to developing sound environmental practices, not only for this generation, but for the future. It was a pivotal experience in my life. The exposure to differing political philosophies and the awareness of the conflicts involved in natural resource management opened my eyes to the difficult choices needed to be made by those responsible for environmental stewardship. By urging national policymakers to consider bringing youthful enthusiasm into the complex process of solving environmental problems, I have hopefully contributed to future involvement by interested and concerned young people of our country.
My interest in the environment has afforded me extraordinary opportunities to contribute my time and talent. Anyone who truly feels passionate about any issue needs only to volunteer and opportunities will present themselves that will help that person pursue his or her cause of interest.
John T. Vogel, 17, grade12, Jesuit High School, San Antonio, FL [http://www.jesuittampa.org]
The media often cover teens that get into trouble, but there are many more teens in America making a positive impact on their communities.
One program that I volunteer for is the mentoring program at one of our local elementary schools. Once a week, I go to the school and spend time with a fifth grade student. We play on the playground or go to the library, and we talk about how her week is going. The program is set up to help guide the children who might be at risk of having problems in the future. In my opinion, this is one of the more successful programs that our high school has because the children are gaining their confidence at a younger age. I have seen a lot of improvements in the children who have mentors, and those improvements will carry through the rest of their lives.
Being able to impact another person's life is one of the reasons why so many teens are willing to give up their time to help others. Something as simple as dedicating one hour of time, less than one percent of your week, can drastically change someone's life. Teenagers volunteer their time because they want to. They are doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, with no rewards in sight. But even though there are no concrete rewards, the skills and confidence that one gains are priceless.
Kelsey Blom, 18, grade 12, Centennial High School, Circle Pines, Minnesota [http://www.centennial.k12.mn.us/chs]
Every year my church takes its active young members on a youth trip. Last year we went to Chicago and worked in a Salvation Army shelter—well, they don't want to call it a shelter, they call it "living assistance" or something like that—but we worked there. We decorated the day care center and cooked meals for the residents. This year we are going to Canada, and I'm looking forward to that. For the past two years, I have also been going to a Christian camp called "Friend Camp." Area teens from different churches gather at Fredericksburg Christian High School, which is a private school, and we stay there for a week, and we trade in our beds for air mattresses, and we sleep on the floor.
The organizers choose ten houses belonging to poor people, and we repair them. It's pretty cool, because they separate us so that we are not only with people from our own churches, but with people from all different churches. We work together, and really get our hands dirty. For example, we had to repair the roof of one house, which entailed taking off 11 layers of old linoleum and replacing the roof. I got to do things I had never done before. Some of the people we helped had believed that young people don't care, but we proved to them that we do.
Kristen Grymes, 17, grade 12, James Monroe High School, Fredericksburg, Virginia [http://www.cityschools.com/jmhs]
From the July 2005 edition of eJournal USA.
