‘Volunteering is hard and boring,’ you say. Sure, but it can also be an enjoyable and deeply life-changing experience.
Elizabeth Reinking
Staff Writer
Have you ever been forced to volunteer? Putting the inherent irony of that phrasing aside, I remember when I was required to complete a five-hour service project for every year of high school, of which two hours were used to plan and reflect on the whopping three hours of actual service. At the time, it hardly seemed worth the trouble and, along with the majority of my student body, I usually faked it. While not my finest moment, at the time I just didn’t see what difference those three hours would make to anyone.
Now, as a frequent actual volunteer, I am sometimes asked why I bother giving up my limited free time to help others. This is a question with an answer that is worth exploring. Why should we volunteer?
As college students, our lives are, more often than not, run on very tight schedules. Besides basic class and homework demands, many of us have jobs and play sports as well, and all of us (hopefully) have friends. To be honest, sometimes those five hours or so one might like to use to improve the community just don’t seem to be there. Should we run ourselves ragged for people we don’t even know?
Certainly there’s no denying that people in this country need help. With tens of millions living in abject poverty, and one in every six of those a child, it seems a little silly to dismiss them all as being “too lazy to get a job.” When a single mother working at a minimum wage job earns barely more than $10,000 a year with which to raise her family, and an African-American male is more likely to go to jail than to graduate from college, how does a person quiet his or her conscience enough to sleep at night? Please, if you can, let the rest of us know how you do it, because our consciences just won’t shut up.
The drive of many Pepperdine students to volunteer is likely based upon religiously rooted morality. Even putting that worthy motivation aside, doesn’t basic human decency call for assisting people in such dire need?
“But volunteering is hard,” you say. “Volunteering is boring. The homeless people are smelly, and no one seems to appreciate the fact that I gave up a morning at the beach for this.” Well, I’m not going to lie to you. Volunteering is hard, and it can be boring, and people will be smelly. You’d probably be pretty rank yourself given no access to fresh running water or soap. There can be times when volunteering feels like torture. You count down the minutes to when you can escape back into your familiar world of whining about Convocation and Caf food.
There are, however, other times. There are times when you hang out with children with such sunny attitudes on life that would suggest their lives are perfect, when in actuality they sleep in a homeless shelter and play in a hall clogged with smoke and littered with broken glass. There are times when the teen from the detainment camp you’re tutoring at successfully does his math homework all by himself, and is excited about what he’s learned from you. There are times when, as cheesy as it sounds, volunteering will affect you so deeply that it can change your life.
In the end, though, it doesn’t matter whether your experience was good or bad. The point of community service shouldn’t be for you to have a good time. Really, volunteering isn’t about having fun, and it isn’t about whether if you want to be there. What matters most, in fact, is that you showed up at all.
09-09-2004
