Hey guys!

I am Ani and this is my blog, created for writing about issues in my homecountry community. There are many social, political or economic issues in my country, that are important not only for me, but for community in general. But I will stress only one of them in this essay, that I think is most important for me and I can have some influence on that. One of the best things that I like in USA is community service (volunteering). People agree to help others for free, even if they don’t know them. That is very generous and useful for not only your personality, for country and society as well. The definition of volunteering is to promote good and improve life of society, including your own.

In my country, Georgia, community service is not very common. People don’t seem to care about others and their most common excuse is time. But it’s wrong. What can be more pleasant than helping others and hearing “thank you” coming out from the hearts of the people that you barely know, but you’re helping them as you would help yourself?

One of my favorite quotes by Audrey Hepburn says:” As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands, one for helping yourself, the other for helping others.” I totally agree with that. I’m growing old, I see other countries developing and as a patriotic citizen I start to think: What can I do for my country? How can I improve the level of living? How can I help? And this is what comes to my mind. What if it’s not just me who wants to help? What if there are plenty of people thinking the same way, but don’t know how to react? They need a leader or someone who can show them the way to follow, the example to follow. Maybe I can be that leader. I would like to make a club at school first, then maybe in community, to encourage everyone and especially young generation to help other people and don’t expect any gain, except respect and self-worth.

In Georgia, there are not many activities for volunteering, as it is in USA. Here you can go anywhere to find little tables saying “need volunteers” and you see a lot of people signing up. But in Georgia you can hardly see people volunteering to help others without any financial gain. Of course I wish to change that in my country, but only thing to think about is how. I will start with a club in my school and ask my friend to join it. Then I’ll try to make friends of my friends join the club, and then their friends and I hope our club will get many students. I would arrange the meetings for this club, where I would inform all the members about this activity, sharing my personal experience and other people’s experiences from the workshop. I would organize some events for volunteering. I’ve been in US for nearly two months now and in spite of my homework assignments and activities with my host family for exploring US, I have already done 45 hours of community service. Doing good things for free makes one’s self-respect rise. But you also realize that during these activities you’re actually having a lot of fun and making new friends. That’s why I think the club I’m going to make will be successful. 

This is my big goal to be able to do all the things that I described above. But I will need some help arranging everything and understanding how it works in US, to be able to make it work in Georgia too. I will try my best to be part of these workshop, because it can help me a lot to achieve my goal.

What goes around, comes around.