Driven to Give

I know that giving back to the community is important. I know this because it is an idea that has been driven into my brain by countless teachers and advisers. I know this because I’ve filled out a community service section on every application I have ever completed. I have known this as long as I can remember, but I was unable to feel the importance of giving back to a community until I traveled to Argentina.
In 2009, I went on a service-based trip to Buenos Aires. I was 17 and it was my first experience traveling without my parents. This independence was what I was most excited about; I viewed community service as the obligation that would earn me my freedom.
One of our volunteer sites was a woman’s home in a Shanty Town. The slum was composed of row after row of small, decrepit, illegal “houses.” Shanty Town citizens had constructed their homes of a hodgepodge of materials: scraps of metal, wood, and even cardboard, with pieces of aluminum siding for roofs. This patchwork community was unlike anything I had ever seen.
Innumerable inhabitants could have benefited from our help, but we were there for one woman. This woman wanted us to paint a room of her home. At first I found this strange. Her house, poorly constructed to begin with, was falling apart. Shouldn’t she be worried about more than the color of a room? Then, I began to learn about this woman. She had eight children. While giving birth to the youngest, she had been injected with something that caused her to lose use of her left leg. She ran a soup kitchen out of her home for the rest of the community. And the reason she wanted us to fix up that room? She wanted children in the Shanty Town to have a safe, clean place to go so that they could study or play after school.
This woman had so little, but she is the most giving person I have ever met. This woman didn’t tell me how important it is to give back, but she showed me how it feels to be passionate and driven about helping others.