While many post secondary students struggle with their minimal social lives, a select few continue to find time to go out, not for themselves but for others less fortunate.
Workers at the Calgary Drop-In Centre pose outside. Volunteers have been lending a helping hand both to the centre and the homeless community since its opening in 1961.
Rebka Zewde, 20, in her second year in the social work program at the University of Calgary, has volunteered at the Calgary Drop-In Centre since early 2009. The largest homeless shelter in Canada, the centre has offered aid to Calgary’s less fortunate since 1961.
“I feel good about myself when I volunteer because I feel that I’m giving back to the world,” Zewde said.
Although the young volunteer finds time on weekends to help at the Drop-In Centre, she admits finding time to volunteer and complete her heavy workload can be stressful.
“It is difficult at times, but when I volunteer it’s refreshing,” Zewde said. “I don’t think of it as another responsibility, but a privilege.”
Carl Tang, 24, a second year business student at Mount Royal University, has volunteered in the Drop-In Centre’s kitchen for eight months.
“Students are always busy with something,” Tang said.
“Tthey can be playing basketball for their college team or playing guitar in a band. As for us, we volunteer.”
Tang said that when he first began volunteering at Peter Lougheed Hospital, he’d been coming to visit his younger brother who had been injured in a car accident and so he would come read to him.
Tang was told by a nurse about volunteering at Peter Lougheed and he began shortly after.
“My brother would have to spend nights alone and I knew that he wasn’t the only one,” Tang added. “The world is filled with many neglected people.”
Tang began volunteering by reading to patients and found the patients were happy to see him return each week.
“I think they were happy to see just about anyone, and that’s why I did it,” Tang said.
Lori Schneider, a supervisor at the Drop-In Centre, applauds all the volunteers who find time to give back to the community.
“They are wonderful and have so much heart in what they do,”
Schneider, who has worked at the Drop-In Centre for 10 years, said it’s rare for students to be consistent in their volunteering, but both Zewde and Tang have showed lots of passion in volunteering.
Tang is looking forward to this summer, when he and four classmates will fly to Northern Mexico and help build homes for underprivileged families.
Zewde said she wants to continue volunteering abroad.
“I’d like to go to Asia and do humanitarian work for a poor country,” she said.
Zewde has successfully helped put together a non-profit organization which raised money to build a school in her native Ethiopia. The school has 27 students and continues to grow.
