I am a 26-year-old male community college student. I live in San Francisco, California, but was born in Korea and lived there until I was 22. I am an international student majoring in the Health Sciences. I decided that moving to the United States and pursuing my educational and career goals would offer me a chance to expand both personal knowledge and gain greater insight into a different cultural experience. Certainly, this has been the case. Not only are customs completely different in the United States, but communication and expectations are as well. While San Francisco is a major city, and at times crowded, it is nothing like the wall-to-wall experience of people in Asia. Additionally, I know from my studies that America is considered a large "melting pot," but I was certainly never prepared for there to be so many different ethnicities and diverse people all grouped together in one city. This, and other differences in the cultural and social lives of the city, caused me to think a great deal about events that changed my life. Before I moved to the United States, I was a general biology major at a college in Korea. I was also chairman of a volunteer group at the college called NANURI sharing love). The group consisted of about 15 people and we went to what is known in Korea as a "Flower Village." These Flower Villages are actually long-term nursing care and hospice facilities, primarily for the poor and homeless. Our group assisted nurses, read to the clients, assisted them with daily tasks, and helped around the facility. As a hospice volunteer especially, I learned to respect the gift of life, but also to understand that life and living are cycles that must be respected and that within this cycle, sometimes people must move to their...

The volunteer experience allowed me to appreciate my own situation in life, to respect that everyone has something to give and contribute to the world, and that the simple act of caring and sharing with others can empower and actualize oneself. In fact, largely because of this experience, I changed majors and began to refocus my life and study nursing, with the eventual aim of dedicating my career to helping others less fortunate.
As I prepared for this assignment, in fact, the idea of service and volunteering began to weigh on my mind -- and I began to compare and contrast the attitude towards service between Koreans and Americans. Clearly, the idea of volunteerism is not dead in America. There are hundreds of agencies, the Peace Corps, civilian and religious groups, and even school projects that take on volunteer projects. What is interesting is that one would expect, during harder economic times, that the spirit of volunteering would lag in America- that people would close in more and take care of their own issues. In fact, this appears not to be the case. According to the Corporation for National Community Service, volunteering is stead if not increasing in America despite economic downturns, and the people volunteering are often those who are sometimes hit hardest by the economy. This tells me that there is a sense of compassion that seems to transcend isolated issues and allows people to move out of their comfort zone and find ways to help others -- thereby actually helping themselves in the process. This was most certainly true for me, for in the daily tasks of volunteering, I literally found myself and my center, my ability to look past the physical or even intellectual aspects of a person and…