Volunteer.

"Anyone can volunteer" and "anyone can lie about how many hours s/he volunteered." I can't disagree with the latter because it's true: in many cases it's quite simple to fabricate a reasonable number to place on a piece of paper. But not anyone can volunteer. Volunteering is for the people who truly care about the people they are helping and want to see the smile they can put on someone else's face at the end of the day. It's not the hours that count but the experiences and life lessons that we learn from these precious memories and occurrences irreplaceable by any other. Volunteering is not for bragging rights or for ostentantious purposes; volunteering exists so that we have the opportunity to help others less fortunate than we are because we have the means and the motivation to do so. By helping others, we are essentially helping ourselves as we are able to feel proud of ourselves that we performed an unselfish act of caring about someone other than us.

When I hear people talk about volunteering as if it were just for the hours to pad their college resume or they speak as if it were something so trivial, I tend to think that they don't truly understand the meaning of volunteerism. Yes there are people who lie or aimlessly volunteer, but that's not the purpose nor the intent of investing our time, energy, and effort into bettering the lives of others. The objective of volunteering is to do good for both sides: the volunteers and the person we volunteer for, and by lying our way through this process, we're not really really gaining anything. Sure we might be able to sufficiently lie about our "philanthropic nature" to impress colleges; but instead of being able to feel proud about something that we truly accomplished, we have to put on a fake smile to masquerade the lie that was told over and over again.

#volunteer