Learning about the rest of the world, via volunteering

Yesterday I mentioned that volunteering can be a side-effect of free CLE's.

Volunteering, in itself, can be rewarding. You learn something new about an area of law and meet new people. For those of us who grew up as spoiled Americans, it can be shocking to learn exactly how spoiled we are. Anyone with a middle-class upbringing (even lower-middle-class like mine), is spoiled rotten compared to much of the world, and many people in the US.

If you felt deprived in comparison with classmates from your high school, for the most part, food, clothing and shelter still weren't an issue. You might not have had designer clothes, may have bought everything on sale, only got new clothes at the beginning of school, for Christmas and when you went to camp, shopped thrift stores or got hand-me-downs, but if you had a closet full of clothes as is typical of Americans, you had much more than Americans living below the poverty line and people from much of the world.

While I know poverty isn't limited to other countries and that particularly in inner-cities, people don't always have enough food, there are programs in our schools that ensure kids get breakfast and lunch. In some countries, none of that exists; not the required schooling, not breakfast, not lunch. Even if you think you're poor because you can't afford to go out to eat or can't afford anything but Denny's or Waffle House? You're not poor. Even if all you buy is PB&J and Ramen products. You're still not poor. Especially if you think you're poor but still drink pop out of 20-oz bottles. Even if all you buy are the 2-liter bottles.

Meeting people from other countries can be a revelation; I once worked on a project with men from an African country. I swear to you, their objective was to create a non-profit in the US and use it as a method of overthrowing the current government in their country. These men had great, grandiose, all-encompassing ideas for their organization, which would've dwarfed the Red Cross and United Nations combined. They couldn't help it, most of them had worked for one of the former governments in their country. Which is one of the reasons they came here. They had some great ideas but no concept that they needed to start small because they needed to get funding. I guess they just assumed that great amounts of funding were readily available, since that's what they'd had before their leader was deposed.

Most volunteering won't involved groups like that, just one person who has a problem whether it's criminal in nature, they've been a victim of a crime or are in need of assistance in getting their asylum application or refugee status approved, or a common, garden variety of immigration law question. In any case, you won't be left on your own and will have the opportunity to gain mentors, experience and feel relevant to society by helping someone else.