Free Choice: 3

I am currently enrolled in a class called service leadership, where we learn about different types of service and how to do our own research and make our own projects. I am glad that I'm taking it because I feel that it will help me find more opportunities to give back. Recently, we have been concentrating particularly on the environmental aspect of both our local and our global communities. The more I learn, the more I feel obligated to do something about what is happening in our world and on our island. My sophomore class has been learning about helping others and how such little things as a dollar a week can make as big a difference as someones life. Not only am I learning about this in service leadership, but in science and English as well. In fact our two essential questions for this whole English semester are who am I in this world and what type of world is this. We also just had a big project in science about how we can find alternate sources for our energy that would both save money and our environment. There are so many little things we can do to improve our environment every day that would have very little affect on our daily lives such as eating locally grown food, walking to school or simply traveling less.
In the beginning of English, this semester we read two very interesting articles on helping others in general. There are so many things we can do that would be so easy and yet we never seem to get around to doing them. The two articles were, The Singer Solution to World Poverty and The Gift, a biography about Zell Kravinsky. They both had very strong and controversial ideas generally telling us that if we bought a ten dollar t-shirt instead of donating that money to a third world country, where a child's life could be saved with it, then we were directly killing that child, cold blooded murder. While I do not completely agree with this idea, I do feel more obligation to be frugal and the article haunts me every time I pass my I.D. card over the snack bar counter. Even if our hands are not bloody, perhaps we are closer to that daunting name of murder than we think. Every time I take a bite of food or drink a sip of water am I starving an infant across the world? Every time I get dressed in the morning is someone in Africa dying of heat stroke? Every time I step under my roof to sleep is a child in South America left out at night? How direct are my actions to the rest of the world and every time I take, is someone else loosing?