Discuss your involvement in and contributions to a community near your home, school or elsewhere. Please select an experience different from the one you discussed in the previous question, even if this experience also involved leadership. What did you accomplish? How did this experience influence your goals? 1000 words or less.
Sujata Mapchan's response,
Preventing Cervical Cancer (PINCC) is a non-profit organization, which helps women around the world to prevent and cervical cancer. They provide medication, educate the communities and train healthcare workers to save women’s lives. Some of the countries PINCC has been involved in are: Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Cameroon, Nicaragua, India, Peru and many more.
More than 800 women die EACH DAY from a preventable disease. Nonetheless, PINCC is fighting to change this. With PINCC’s support, many women have been cured, almost 10,000 have been treated and won’t get cervical cancer and die!. Hearing about PINCC and all the stories about women’s lives being saved, I HAD to be part of this amazing organization! With the help of a family friend, I started volunteering with PINCC.
One of the things that is unique about PINCC, in my experience, is that they are primarily a training organization. Volunteer doctors and nurses go to other countries and provide service, but mostly what they are doing is training local nurses and midwives to do this work. Then PINCC returns to each clinic every 6 months, checks their record keeping, reviews patients and increases the level of training. After about a year and a half, the medical practitioners are almost self-sufficient in doing this work!
PINCC has different events, time to time, each year, to fundraise to buy medical equipment in order to keep women from dying every day. I have been volunteering at different events over many years to help PINCC’s staff get ready for their trips. Each year we have collected money which is very useful when it comes to saving someone’s life. PINCC has not saved every woman who is diagnosed with cervical cancer, but they are hoping to save many of the women, by training healthcare workers in each country they have been to. By providing education, less women will die because of this cancer.
Sujata's response,
I have been a volunteer at PINCC from middle school, up until now. Every year, hearing that PINCC is going to different countries, has given me more reason to continue volunteering. I have always wanted to help different types of people in some way, and by being involved with PINCC I have accomplished this because we have fundraised a lot of money, and more people are getting involved with the organization.
When I first went to help PINCC, I was somewhat shy. I didn’t feel very confident in my skills to contribute and wasn’t used to talking to adults whom I didn’t know. The more I volunteered here, I felt more comfortable, and became more out-going. I have received a lot of support from the people at PINCC. I feel like they like me, and appreciate my help, that they don’t want to judge me and so I am more out-going. Working with PINCC has exposed me to lots of new people, all of whom are helping improve the world.
I want to be able to keep on volunteering with PINCC because it is saving so many lives. So far, I have worked at their Annual Walk-a-Thon for 4 years. This raises money for their work in Africa. I go to their Packing Parties, where we count and pack medical supplies that will go on their work trips. I have worked at the High-Tea fundraiser for 3 years, which provides money for their South and Central America clinics.
Since I have learned more about the work PINCC does, I have encouraged my friends to volunteer also. My friends have enjoyed it, and we have all been glad to be contributing our time to this worthy organization. By seeing what important work this non-profit can do, it reinforces my commitment to getting a college education and being of service to my community and the world.
