Is there always a "trigger" in the act of volunteering?

In this post I would like to introduce you to one of the inspirational student volunteers at my university. She has initiated her own organization – WE CARE. We have a couple of similar leaders in our university. Her story is slightly different because it is her childhood experiences that have influenced her to initiate WE CARE.

She started on by volunteering with Volunteer for Bangladesh (VBD). She joined the group two years before as an Asian University for Women (AUW) representative. Her role was to attend the meetings organized by VBD officers and to promote their programs within AUW.  She says that it was Volunteer for Bangladesh’s (VBD) promotional video that inspired her. She has been quite successful in getting the word around as we had around 150 AUW students volunteering in the Universal Childrens Day (UCD) campaign 2012.

For her, the incentive is self-satisfaction. She says that by stating “if you don’t give, you don’t get back” and explains how the initiative of one professor has changed her life. She doesn’t want to take that help as granted. Rather, she is committed towards lending helping hands to as many lives as possible.  She had some of the worst experiences in her life just because of her stammer. She never used to talk in class under the fear of embarrassment. Her advisor who came to know about this talked with the university’s authority and managed to send her to Mukundapur medical hospital in India for a three week program.  In this program, they identified her level of stammering and helped her in figuring out the letters that were uncomfortable for her to speak. She was lucky to get into this Indian government sponsored program which was open only for Indians.

This event changed her life. Don’t misunderstand me. The program wasn’t a miracle. It did take time for her to be the person she is today. From the program she realized that there is no cure for stammering. She had to accept it. She successfully got over it and eventually got a scholarship to go to third One Young World summit in Pittsburgh (2012,) where she represented Sri Lanka.

For her rather than the nationality it is the subjects that matters. She chose to work with kids and subjects with special needs irrespective of the communities they are from.  She views volunteering as serving people regardless of boundaries. At the same time she admits that there are challenges in being a Sri Lankan and volunteering in Bangladesh. The main challenge is language. Also, in a cross-cultural program she is always titled as an ‘outsider’ though she has tried her best to be an ‘insider’. Therefore, she has to put an extra effort to gain the subjects’ trust.

Her future goal is to get a post-doctoral degree. She prioritizes education over everything else because she strongly believes that without education people will not recognize you. WE CARE is been sponsored by One Young World and she is devoted towards making a change with her organization.

You can read more about her here.