Ligonier Valley High School
Senior? Yes
Elite top 100? Yes
Letters of recommendation: Letter of Recommendation 1, Letter of Recommendation 2
To me, volunteerism means opportunity. There is opportunity for me as an individual to grow and share my experiences. In the summer of 2017, I went on a mission trip to Colorado to work with Habitat for Humanity. One night, my youth group went to a local soup kitchen in Glenwood Springs. We spent the majority of our time there serving, but also talking with the locals who came in to eat the food. Towards the end of the evening there, a woman came in. She seemed very quiet and unsure of what was going on. We soon figured out that the woman did not speak English. At this moment, I was given the opportunity to communicate with her and help her get the food she needed because of my ability to speak Spanish. I made a connection with this woman and I hope that she remembers our conversations later in her life. Along with individual opportunity to grow in ability and emotion, volunteerism does something even better. It allows people to have access to experiences and opportunities that they might not have had on their own. In the summer of 2018, I got to see this in some children that I met in the Dominican Republic. My youth group went to small village in the town of Barahona. Our main goal was to help reconstruct and paint a church for this village, but we got to experience these happy and amazing kids in the process. We brought them some lollipops, baseballs, kickballs, and these kids were given the opportunity to have fun in ways that they couldn’t before. It may seem like a small way to help someone, but their reactions were beyond anything we could have expected. Volunteerism has made me a more aware individual. It is about connecting with people and bringing some light into their lives, however possible. Our different life experiences shape the people that we become in the future. All of the opportunities that I have taken to volunteer have impacted me so heavily because I can see the chain reaction that I am a part of. With opportunity comes even more opportunities. What I do, or what anyone else does, to help those around them impact the future and cause the reaction to remain ever-growing.