Many students see summer vacation as a time to relax and take a break from the demands of school. While many were sunbathing and sleeping in, however, two Grady students were volunteering to help those in other parts of the world.

This July, junior Jamie Panarites spent three weeks in the Dominican Republic as part of a high school volunteer program organized by the Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE). Panarites worked with a group of more than 30 volunteers at a children’s summer camp in La Piedra, a poor neighborhood in the Dominican Republic.

“I chose to take part in the program because I wanted to travel, I wanted to volunteer somewhere, and I wanted to improve my Spanish,” Panarites said. “I also just wanted to step out of my comfort zone and meet new people and experience new things in a completely different way.”

During her stay, Panarites taught children English and helped repair local buildings.

“The first week I went around the neighborhood spray painting numbers onto houses because they didn’t have any house numbers or street signs or anything like that,” Panarites said. “The third week I helped paint houses. The average house there was a one-room tin shack, and they were very rusted and obviously had no air conditioning—in the Dominican Republic, in July.”

Senior Jess Hume also volunteered abroad this summer, spending two weeks in Ulannbaatar, Mongolia through a program created by Projects Abroad, a volunteer organization that provides a variety of service projects in developing countries. During her trip, Hume did nursing work at local hospitals, taking patients’ pulses and blood pressure. Hume also did outreach work in the city’s poorer areas, where she gave medical tests and food to the homeless.

“I definitely want to be a doctor,” Hume said. “I’ve always been really interested in medicine… When I was younger, I really wanted to be a vet. Earlier this year I did an internship at Grady Hospital, and that really solidified for me that I wanted to be a doctor. I’m really good at medicine—it comes really easily and naturally to me.”

Both Panarites and Hume said they plan to volunteer abroad in the future.

“I would definitely do it over again,” Panarites said. “I feel like, despite the 75 bug bites I got just on my legs, it was a really good experience. I learned a lot about myself and about America and about the way people perceive America.”

Hume said her experience in Mongolia made her more aware of the vast difference between medical care in the U.S. and other parts of the world. “I saw a lot of really sad things,” Hume said. “We did house calls in an ambulance, and there was one old woman who had a bad heart condition, whose whole family had chipped in to pay for her doctor’s visit. And the doctor said that he couldn’t do anything for her, and that she was going to die. He couldn’t even give her pain medication because her family couldn’t afford it.”

Hume said she hopes to use her career in medicine to prevent similar situations.

“Stories like that, they’re part of what I want to fix,” Hume said. “These people pay so much just for a doctor’s visit and then have to watch their loved ones die because they can’t afford medicine, while we can just go down to CVS and say ‘here’s my prescription, give me my medicine,’ and it’s all taken care of. I don’t like that. I think that’s unfair.”

Panarites also said her time abroad allowed her to experience a very different environment.

“You get it in your head that the way you live your life is just the way the world is,” Panarites said. “Then you step outside of that, and you realize that there are worlds and people outside of your own, and there’s a lot more than what you know… It wasn’t an immediate shock to me, but as soon as I came back to America, it really hit me how different everything was. You’re not allowed to flush toilet paper in the Dominican Republic because the pipes aren’t built for that, and they’ll clog really easily. So, I landed in the Atlanta airport, and I went to the bathroom, and I put the toilet paper in the toilet, and it felt so wrong to me.”

Both Hume and Panarites said they would encourage other students to take part in similar programs.

“I feel like everyone can get a really great experience out of traveling abroad,” Panarites said. “The program I did was focused on interacting with kids, but there are all kinds of volunteer opportunities. I believe that there is a program out there for anyone who is interested.”

Although they traveled to different parts of the world, both girls said their time abroad had a great impact on them.

“I want to travel and do more work in third world countries,” Hume said. “I want to do that more than anything else. That’s probably my life goal. I really enjoy volunteering because I just like helping people. That sounds really corny, but it’s true. I find it really rewarding.”