When I was in high school and college, I took a particularly cynical view on volunteering. Everybody in my peer group did it, whether it was spending time at a soup kitchen, raising money for cancer awareness, or the various other activities that many youth take up in their spare time after school. Of course, helping others is in and of itself is good, but what bothered me was that the primary driving force behind school-age volunteerism was putting it on the ol' resume.  Participating in a volunteer organization for the sake of personal gain struck me as more vile than just sitting at home and watching TV. And so, I spent most of my school years avoiding volunteerism in quiet protest.

After finishing school and getting a job, however, I felt an urge to do something more with my free time. When in college, so much goes on—between classes, there's always someone to meet, some show to see, some all-nighter to pull off. The repetitive dullness of life is not made apparent until we enter the working world, when days all blend together and the fruits of our official labor seem only to fuel a machine with which we have no personal connection. And so I thought about volunteering as a way to escape the arguable reality that life is more than just work, play, and sleep.

Aside from close friends and family, there is very little in this world that I care about more than the written, spoken, and read word. When we enter the realm of language, when we learn to read and write and speak, everything else becomes possible—we can form and maintain relationships, we can make concrete hitherto intangible ideas, and we can, on a more mundane level, ask for and get what we want. And so, as I thought about volunteering, I wanted the activity to be authentic, something that I was truly invested in. Don't get me wrong—I do care about cancer victims and the homeless. But I knew that if my chosen activity did not fit my personal interests, volunteering would become just another chore.

I eventually decided on volunteering for a local literacy organization. This particular organization focused primarily on teaching English to adults, mostly immigrants. The organization emphasized teaching practical English. That is to say, the goal was to teach adults new to this country how to use communication to get by, whether it was applying for jobs, talking to their children's teachers, or simply using a tool we so much take for granted—the Internet.

After teacher training, we were given classes to teach based on our respective schedules. I was assigned the task of teaching computer literacy to a group of adults from all over the world, from China, Nigeria, Nicaragua, Mexico, and South Korea. Some students knew how to navigate the Internet in their own language, some did not know how to read at all, regardless of language, and some had never turned on a computer in their lives.

Needless to say, the experience was frustrating. Since the curriculum was open and was constructed at the sole discretion of the volunteer, I could essentially teach them anything they wanted to learn, as long it was related to computers. While, in theory, this room for creativity and classroom input is a great way to get both teachers and students excited about the class, in reality, it initially created chaos. Some students wanted to learn how to use Facebook; others wanted to learn to compose an email, and still others needed to be guided through the process of opening a web browser.

Eventually, however, the semester ended and I did feel as though every student learned at least something new at the crossroads of the English language and technology. My most memorable moment was when one lady from South Korea, who had not seen her son still living and working back home in years, sent her very first email.  Her message to her son was short and simple. "Hi, I'm learning the email. We miss you and we love you." When she first hit the send button, she was literally in tears, she was so excited.

After being for so long a Grinch about volunteering, it was moments like these that have shown me how personally rewarding becoming a volunteer can be. You don't have to invest tons of money or time; you just have to find something you care about.