Volunteering Experience Paper

My experience volunteering at an orphanage in Korea taught me a lot about the Korean culture, the emotional trauma of an orphan, and the gratification of helping others. The learning experience created a great bond and understanding of the children. I was in the Beta club, we had to go to the Korean orphanage in order to get our community service hours, for a week. This orphanage was located at a Catholic church by owners Mrs. Lee and Mr. Sung. They spoke English very well and told us everything and how they started their own orphanage. They started out with nothing and they raised money by volunteering and that’s how they were able to own their orphanage. So all of the beta club members went in and we saw 75% girls and 25% boys. The reason to this was that the Korean couples would only adopt boys than girls. Its some kind of Korean tradition for the mother to have a boy first, the reason to this is that they think that the boy would carry on their legacy. I felt really bad for the kids at the orphanage. Feeling unwanted by the parents is a major trauma for these kids. I have noticed that these kids were not close and did not talk that much. Teaching these kids English was very hard, I would wonder if these kids are listening because they would just sit there and just look at you with out repeating anything. These kids had no smiles at all. I tries very hard to make these kids laugh but I failed to do so. So instead of a week, I decided to go back to the orphanage with some of my …show more content…
I absolutely did not think of this opportunity only as a community service which would benefit me in the future for my resume. I thought of this as a learning opportunity about these orphans and helping these children by giving them a chance to smile and laugh as normal kids would do. I wanted to teach them to always smile and keep their heads up. I achieved a goal in life with this amazing opportunity and would do this all over