Teens spend summer volunteering

For some teenagers, summer is a time to relax between school terms. For some it’s a time to earn extra money, to attend camps or to travel the world.

For others, it’s a time to give back to the local and global communities.

Isabel Carey is a volunteer extraordinaire. Already far past the community service hours required for graduation, she chose to spend this summer and the previous pursuing two of her favorite pastimes — volunteer work and history.

A senior at Belmont High School this year, she began volunteering at the National Archives in Waltham last summer. She enjoyed it so much she spent most of her time there this summer. She says the work is most menial, organizing “crummy old boxes” in musty basements and filing papers. But sometimes the volunteers are asked to help with research projects and the fun begins.

“I was looking though the documents on the Chinese Exclusion Act for a man who was looking for information about his family,” she said. “That was really interesting.”

She helped another researcher create a worksheet on the Alien and Sedition Acts in the course of the nation’s history.

Most of the documents in the Waltham branch contain information about federal laws affecting New England and Boston’s place in the country’s history, she said.

Carey’s love of history “all stems from [her] participation in National History Day in eighth grade.” That project set the stage for her tenth grade project, a performance piece about the history of thalidomide, a drug marketed to women in the late 1950s and early 1960s to help ease the symptoms of pregnancy. The drug cause severe birth defects in many of the babies.

Carey’s individual performance placed ninth in the nation, and she was hooked. She said she doesn’t know what she wants to do at the end of high school, but she hopes to be able to include her love of history in college and beyond.

“I’m interested in a lot of things,” she said. “I’d love to incorporate history into what I end up doing, but I really have no idea what that will be.”

Her quest to figure it out is reflected in her volunteerism. Last year she volunteered at seven different organizations. This summer she restrained herself and only volunteered at three. She was at the archives for 18 hours each week, occasionally shelved books in the Belmont Public Library and was at a food pantry in Cambridge for an average of four hours each week as well.

“I grew up in Cambridge,” she said. “I really miss the vitality of the place. I enjoy going to the pantry because I get to interact with people in the city.”

At the end of the summer she’ll have 625 hours over the community service graduation requirement.

“I’d rather spend my time the way I want to,” she said. “I’d rather spend it furthering causes I’m interested in that working a job I hate.”

Carey’s schoolmate Elena Hill managed to squeeze all of her volunteer hours into three weeks — but she did it in another country.

A junior this year, Hill went to Ecuador with World Horizons International, a volunteer program started by a former Peace Corps member. Teenagers from across the United States travel all over the globe on community service trips.

The group’s goal is to help teens “discover new views of their world, and of themselves,” and Hill said it certainly worked for her.

Her group arrived in Ecuador thinking they were going to help 50 children from a village far in the Andes Mountains learn English.

“Most of the kids were speaking their native Quechuan, and so we decided to work on their Spanish instead,” Hill said.

The group rallied, organizing everything from writing activities to sports activies, all with the goal of improving the kids’ ability to communicate in the most frequently used language in their country.

In the process Hill struck up a friendship via correspondense with a young girl named Rosa. Hill wrote letters to Rosa in the evenings, then gave them to her the next day at school. Rosa responded by the end of the day and the coversations continued throughout her stay.

Unfortunately, Hill said, it’s “pretty much impossible to continue to write to her.”

“The village is so remote it doesn’t even have a mailing address,” she said.

The experience was important, she said, and not just because it improved her conversational Spanish skills immensely.

“I like working with people, and this was a great opportunity to do that outside of my comfort zone,” she said. “It was a very worthwhile experience, even if I don’t end up ‘using it’ later in life.”

For more information about World Horizons, visit their Web site at www.world-horizons.com.