To the Editor:
Tomorrow, 550 students and 50 administrators, faculty and staff will devote their Saturday to our community. Teams will be working throughout the Upper Valley, cleaning child care centers, entertaining Alzheimer's patients, working with disabled children, helping the elderly, contributing their effort at more than 50 sites in the area. The program, Dartmouth Community Outreach Projects (DarCORPS) has been organized by a committee of Dartmouth students who have spent many, many hours over the past two months preparing the program, contacting agencies, recruiting students and organizing logistics.
Will the effort change the Upper Valley? To paraphrase an Indian expression, a grain of rice is only a grain of rice, but rice nourishes a community. The practical impact of service each week to an organization like WISE or LISTEN may be small, but the impact of 1000 students contributing 40,000 hours each year, the number of students and hours involved in Dartmouth Community Services, is very large indeed.
Some of you who participate tomorrow will wonder why you feel so good at the end of the day. Is you do, you will have received a gift. More often than not, the real beneficiaries of volunteerism are volunteers. We realize how lucky we are to be healthy, able and well-fed and well-housed. If this helps us cast a kinder light on other parts of our lives, we are the winners.
So, thank you to the DarCORPS committee for helping us help others and ourselves.
