Through their volunteer work four Dartmouth students have traveled around the girdled Earth overcoming sickness, language barriers and personal danger to help others. In the process of reaching out to the less fortunate, these students said they learned a great deal about other cultures, their communities and themselves.
Working with battered women
The summer after her freshman year, Sarah Cho '97 traveled to Costa Rica where she volunteered for Cefemina, a feminist organization which serves as a resource for battered women.
Cho worked in a clinic and assisted in educating battered women on legal methods of preventing abuse in the town of Le Corina. She also handled an emergency hotline for battered women in San Jose.
Cho had never worked with battered women before arriving in the country.
"It was such a good feeling to help them," she said. "It was great to see hope and to watch the women begin to laugh, cry, talk and hug each other. By speaking about their experiences, they could start to heal."
Cho said the most difficult aspect of her work was connecting verbally with a different culture.
"Even though I was fluent in Spanish, I found the language barrier most difficult because it was hard to get to the level where you could actually help people in a different language and culture," she said. "In an emergency situation you don't have time to think about what verb to use."
In the afternoons, after finishing her work at the clinic, Cho worked with children, adolescents and the elderly in the small village of Limon.
"In the afternoon, around three or four, I worked with little kids," she said. "Ihelped organize groups against [crack cocaine] and taught them English. I tried to offer them alternatives to hanging out in the neighborhood."
Working with the adolescents was more serious, according to Cho. "I tried to be a role model and to educate them about sex and drugs -- I tried to give them some hope," she said.
Cho also found working with the elderly to be "an incredible experience."
"All I did was hang out with them. I danced when they danced, knitted when they knitted and talked to them and made them feel special," she said. "The elderly were happy with so little. I was amazed at how much happiness I could bring to one person."
But shortly after arriving in Costa Rica, Chobecame very sick. Her body was covered with over 200 insect bites and she experienced difficulty breathing. She went to three doctors but none could diagnose her illness.
Cho decided not to return home. "I came here for a reason and to do certain things," she said. "I was sick for two months, but I became used to the sickness. Eventually, it reached a point where I couldn't imagine my life without it."
Cho said her summer in Costa Rica was an enriching experience.
"I became immersed in a life I had never seen before," she said. "My experience in Costa Rica made me realize that there is more to life than what we think about up here at Dartmouth."
She said it was difficult for her to leave Costa Rica because there was so much more she wanted to do. "When I was leaving it felt like I wasn't leaving forever. I left with a new sense of who I was and what I want to do," she said.
Cho is currently a chair of the Tucker Foundation's Big Brother-Big Sister program and is considering volunteering in India in the future.
"Community service is a major part of my life. I can't imagine going to school and not doing volunteer work," she said.
Fighting sickness in Nigeria
Last summer, Mace Turner '95 traveled to Nigeria where he volunteered in a hospital. Each morning, Turner went on rotations in pediatrics, internal medicine or surgery. In the afternoon he traveled to bush areas where he gave out vaccinations.
"I wanted to get some experience working in a hospital," Turner said. "I decided to go to the Third World because I have never had that type of experience before."
Turner received funding for his trip from the Baptist Campus Ministry and through the Tucker Foundation as a Tucker fellow.
Turner said the trips he made to the bush areas, in particular, gave him a real sense that he was doing good for some people.
"There is a lot of opportunity for others to come in and help these people because the diseases which they suffer from are preventable," he said.
According to Turner, diseases like typhoid fever are currently prevalent in Nigeria but are defunct in the United States.
"Nigerians continue to suffer from diseases that are 100 percentpreventable if they have profitable information on how diseases are spread," Turner said. "It is so different from the United States. They don't have our resources."
Turner said although he learned a great deal, the trip was difficult due to the dangerous political climate in Nigeria.
"I went to Nigeria at a bad time," he said. "The newly-elected president was immediately thrown into jail for treason, and it became really dangerous."
Turner said due to the widespread outbreak of violence, he had to leave Nigeria three weeks early.
"I had no contact with the United States for about five weeks because there were no phones," he said. "There was a lot of violence at the airport,and it kept closing."
Turner, who will attend medical school at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center next year, said he plans to return to the Third World in the future.
"I would like going abroad for my fourth year of medical school," he said. "I might consider doing so for part of my life so that I can use my knowledge to help people."
Improving women's literacy
Allison Krasnow '95 is active in the Tucker Foundation and was granted a Tucker Fellowship to Bolivia in the spring of 1993.
In Bolivia, she wrote grant proposals and did research on schools dedicated to increasing women's literacy. She also volunteered in a rural village in the Andes where she assisted in teaching literacy classes.
"My experience in Bolivia convinced me to be a teacher," she said. "It made me believe more strongly in my convictions."
Krasnow has been a Big Sister since her freshman winter, and in the spring of her freshman year she became a chair of the Big Brother-Big Sister Program. "We are working to restructure the program and make it stronger," she said.
She said being a Big Sister has been one of her most rewarding and valuable experiences at the College.
"My little sister has taught me so much over four years," she said. "I feel like I am part of a whole new community."
Krasnow said it was very challenging to establish a relationship with her little sister because the girl's father had died just before they first became acquainted.
"Her father had just died in a terrible accident, and she was unwilling to open up," Krasnow said. "I was very excited, but she wasn't very excited about being with me because she had more pertinent things to think about."
With patience and time, Krasnow said she has developed "an amazing relationship" with her little sister.
"It was difficult to build a relationship at first," she said. "But now she is one of my closest friends at Dartmouth. She has taught me so much about life."
Krasnow also volunteers in the Lebanon school district through the Tucker Foundation by teaching fourth graders English as a second language.
Krasnow said a frustrating aspect of community service is trying to get people involved who do not share her passion for volunteering.
"I believe through community service you can learn a lot about yourself and the community around you," she said. "This is the reason why I tryto get Dartmouth students involved. I hope in a small way we can affect change in the community here."
Next year Krasnow hopes to work in San Francisco on President Bill Clinton's Americorps Program, which strives to integrate community service in high school curricula.
"I am sure I'll do volunteer work throughout my life," she said. "It is something that is really important to me. It is something that I believe in."
Aiding Guatemalan refugees
Jenny Ellis '96 lived and worked with a community of Guatemalan refugees in Mexico last term.
"I am a Spanish major and went on the [Foreign Study Program] in Mexico the year before," she said. "I really wanted to go back and have an experience on my own that would have an impact on the Latin American people."
She worked for Ardigua, the Association of Displaced Refugees from Guatemala and wrote a booklet which was a collection of testimonies from female refugees.
"I talked to a lot of women and some had never told their stories before," she said.
"I remember one woman at my good-bye party came up and thanked me for coming and letting the world know what they have been through," she added.
Ellis also assisted in a seminar for female refugees designed to raise their consciousness and to help them participate more actively in their communities.
She said the experience in Mexico has prompted her to view her life at Dartmouth in a new light.
"It is amazing to think that I jumped back into Dartmouth life, and the people with whom I worked are still struggling," Ellis said. "It's hard for me to believe I have so much and they have so little."
She said her experience in Mexico was particularly exciting because she was there during the midst of a very turbulent time in the country's history.
"It was an incredible time to be in Mexico," Ellis said.
"The peso plummeted, and the Zapatistas were threatening to rise up against the corrupt government. My parents and the people at the Tucker Foundation were worried about my safety," she added.
Ellis has also participated in the High School Appalachian Service Project which rebuilt houses in Kentucky, volunteered at a literacy center in Milwaukee and she is a Big Sister in the Tucker Foundation's Big Brother/Big Sister Program.
