June 9, 2001
Volunteerism is something familiar to all of us. It’s the extension of being kind, generous, and doing good deeds. Everyone has different experiences with volunteer works or community service in one form or the other. When I was growing up in Mater Dei School, the very first thing we learned was to serve the community. We did a lot of community services with the school such as fundraising from collecting spare change, visiting orphanages and retirement homes, and spending time with students of our sister schools in the countryside. It was somewhat a part of the curriculum then, but my mother and her friends took me along when they went out and did their own version of volunteerism and doing good deeds like celebrating my birthday with the orphans, and donating money to buy eyeglass frames for the monks.
American volunteerism is quite different though. They don’t have a requirement in elementary or high school’s curriculum (except for a few public schools, and most private schools). Volunteerism is very much of the kids’ own free will. The sports teams, clubs, and other activity groups like boy scouts or church would start something, and general students decide for themselves to help or not. It’s very much the same way in university life. You will find the university’s volunteer center, clubs, organizations, dorms, and fraternities host some fundraising or community service events.
There are a lot of opportunities to volunteer on campus and off. Some of the things you can pick your favorite cause and help out. I know a couple of Thai undergraduates volunteered for JEP (Joint Education Project) at USC. They tutored elementary students from the elementary school across the street. As you can see, volunteering is not necessarily always about fundraising, food drive, or helping the less fortunate. You can help tutoring your fellow students, students from nearby elementary schools, or becoming a literacy guide by teaching someone to read at your local library. You can run, walk, or swim your way to raise money for a good cause. You can volunteer to give a little talk about Thailand to interested classes. And of course, you can join a march, a memorial service, or a public event that support your cause.
Volunteering does more than gives you nice things to list on your resume, or good karma. It gives you the opportunity to make a difference in your community, and to witness other people’s lives. You will see how it is like out there for the needy. You will meet new people and make connections. You will learn new skills, and get to things you might have never done before. As you set out to aid others, you set out to discover yourself and your potentials. Finding a cause to support, or a program to volunteer for is not at all difficult here. (And I don’t think it is all that hard back home either.) Someone is always organizing something somewhere.
Even President Bush joined in the effort!
USC Civil Engineering Honor Society sent out an email, looking for volunteers to join them in building houses for the poor with Habitat for Humanity. Habitat for Humanity is a nonprofit, Christian housing organization. With donations and volunteer support, HFH provide low-cost homes to low-income families who are willing to put their labor into building the houses themselves under supervision of experts. I grabbed my non-USC best friend Nora, and off we went to join the engineer kids and other Trojans for one Saturday of good deeds. Not all of us really knew what we were doing. My only experience with building anything was helping my drama teacher built theater sets in high school, and put together all of my Ikea furniture. People at HFH gave us hardhats and equipments we might need, and we followed the master builders to our destination. The pros told us what to do and how we could do it. Nora and I stuck with hammering the support beams inside instead of climbing about the scaffolds. (We’re not too keen on heights and wobbliness.) At the end of the day, we came home with nicks on our arms, splinters in our legs, sore thumbs, and happy and content hearts, knowing that we had just helped putting roofs over people’s heads.
That was my first laboring volunteer experience, and I never had so much fun! In the past I have done fundraising, food and toys drives, and getting people to a blood drive. All of those were hard works also but I never felt so involved. Now I’m having what they called a volunteer syndrome—once you did one, you want to do more and more. I still have yet to get back to HFH site nearby to work on more houses. My next project though is a whole new experience for me. I have always been a supporter of civil rights, more so gay rights, but I have never done anything drastic about that before. Now I’m going to be in the West Hollywood’s Gay Pride Parade this June. I’m choreographing a bit of a skid for the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transsexual (GLBT) group from USC. You bet you’ll hear from me afterward!
Some of you might not feel comfortable volunteering in a foreign country. And many of you feel like all you have time to do is go to class, study, and do your papers. Now that I encourage you to volunteer, some of you give me a nasty look. “Do you really think I have time for other stuff?” Hey, if you have time to run amuck on the soccer field with your friends, go shopping, or watch Iron Chef marathon on the Food Network all afternoon, I bet you do have time to do other things, especially activities that actually make differences in other people’s lives. Go on out there and change the world, a little bit at a time, and you’ll be surprise just how much you’d learn about what is out there in the real world, and what is there inside you.
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