Why I Volunteer

The first time I cried was about two weeks into my first trip to Ghana. I was teaching in an orphanage, and I'd arrived full of hope and confidence, with all kinds of warm, fuzzy feelings about helping others and making a difference.

After days of eagerly reporting to my job and spending long hours sweating and stumbling through lessons in a concrete classroom next to the kitchen, where an open fire on the floor heated up the building like a brick oven, I realized that what I thought I knew about life, poverty, children and human suffering really amounted to less than the tiny sliver of chalk I was sharing with two other teachers.

I grew to love my students, and in doing so, I began to learn about their lives. They became more than just faces looking back at me. They became little humans full of struggles and challenges that I couldn't imagine going through at such a young age (or even now). And, in learning about them, I also realized that I was surrounded by an entire country full of people who had to create their own dignity and strength out of very little.

One student's father was dying of AIDS. He wandered the streets at night searching for food for his five brothers and sisters. Each day, he arrived in his torn and tattered uniform, the buttons missing and the seams frayed from wear. He wore a second pair of shorts under his uniform because of the holes in it, and would be swatted with a cane during inspections because of his unkempt appearance. He never missed one of my classes.

A couple of my students were orphans. They slept on pieces of foam on the concrete floor of the orphanage, where mice and cockroaches ran over them and bit them at night. They laid their mats in the sun once a week or so to kill bed bugs that were so plentiful that I could see them jumping and crawling across the surface in the daytime. One of them, a girl named Ampoma who was just nine years old, died a year later from the combination of parasites she'd contracted from their contaminated well and sickle-cell anemia.

Another boy was living with his aunt and several siblings in a room behind a restaurant. His parents were poor farmers and could not feed the children. Many were not going to school because they were taking turns, paying school fees for only the ones they could afford.

There were more … the little girl with wild, unkempt hair who told me she was an orphan because she wanted me to take her home; the serious little boy who took it upon himself to translate for everyone so that we could all understand what each other was saying; the little boy who was made fun of because he and his father hunted bush rats to feed the family; and the little girl who hid in the bush every day instead of going to school because she had a learning disorder the other teachers didn't understand. There were so many, and they all have places in my heart.

So, two weeks into my month-long stay, I began to realize that the roadblocks these children had to a happy future were much bigger than anything I had the power to change. I was just a temporary candle in their dark lives, and anything that I did, I felt, would fade into the patchwork that would make up long lives of struggle and hardship. I was going to go back to my own life and, I asked myself, what difference had I really made?

I laid on my bunk that night and cried silently for hours as the reality sunk in. I only later found out that my roommates, volunteering at different projects, were often doing the same thing.

Then, something happened. I realized that poverty is not just a lack of money or food or physical things, it's being isolated from people who can make you see your full potential. With nothing to reach for, there is no purpose. With no one to show you that you can reach, and that your life is precious and valued, where does one find hope? Instead of trying to cram a year's worth of learning into my last two weeks, I began making empowerment my mission. Sure, I still taught lessons, but the message of, “You are worthwhile and you are loved,” became most important.

I have now cried, unashamed, many times for hundreds of people and their suffering. I have listened to terrible stories about loss and pain that are told just as non-nonchalantly as a weather report, and I have held a first grader after she was brutally raped, my heart heavy because I was the first, and probably the only person, to tell her that it wasn't her fault. I have given my own food to strangers who needed it more than I did, and I have been fed by people who insist on sacrificing what little they have for me. The humanity I have experienced through my work has made me rich beyond anything money could ever buy. I have learned that we are all connected, and we are all very much more alike than we are different.

I think the role for every one of us as volunteers is something very different than what we may think at first. We go to these places to make a difference – and we do … but it's not necessarily in lessons taught or illnesses treated. It's in showing people that their lives have value, and that we care enough to be that light in the dark and cry for their pain, because it is our pain, too.

Amanda Christmann Larson is Director of Compassionate Journeys, a 501(c)(3) non-profit volunteer organization dedicated to bringing resources and awareness to empower people in Ghana, West Africa. In the summer of 2012, Amanda and friends will be riding bicycles from San Diego, California to St. Augustine, Florida with Babes Blocking Traffic to spread awareness about child trafficking. Visit www.compassionatejourneys.com and www.babesblockingtraffic.com for more information.