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Paying It Forward >> For others, a service career offers an avenue for living gratefully. Wende Valentine ’92, whose father, Ralph Valentine ’62, taught music at Choate for decades, grew up marking holidays by serving at area soup kitchens. She’s intimately aware of life’s fragility. After Choate, she got so ill from dysentery in Madagascar that she thought she might die among the cockroaches in a local clinic. On a college field study trip to Belize, one of her friends contracted spinal meningitis and died. Such experiences helped make her unafraid to die, she says, and to live each day with a certain grateful vigor. That ethic drives her work as major gifts officer at Water For People, a non-profit agency that provides sustainable water and sanitation in developing countries. The need is sobering: she says a child under five dies every 30 seconds due to water-related illness. Her organization’s work is supported in part through Challenge21, a fundraising initiative that Valentine manages with classmate Danielle Elkin ’92. “I feel incredibly fortunate to have two healthy children under the age of five,” says Valentine, who lives in Golden, Colo. “When we have all of our basic human needs met, it’s a matter of all of us doing our part to pay it forward.” As members of the Choate community learn to open their hearts in many ways, they’re not the only ones changed by the process. Beneficiaries of their efforts are leading notably better lives. It’s obvious at Wallingford’s Boys & Girls Club, which offers affordable after-school care for working families. Daily attendance has swelled from 60 to 80 with the tough economy; adult staff and volunteers are now stretched thin. But they’re getting help from Choate, which sends students as many as four days per week to help with homework and play games. One recent day, two Choaties played ping pong with excited boys while a third treated a girl to a game of Candy Land. “I usually don’t need help with my homework, but when I do need help, I go to the Choate kids,” says 11-year-old Stephen Zenisky, who’s narrowed down his career options to four: mathematician, doctor, football player or pro wrestler. “I’ve always wanted an older sibling, and they make me feel like I have an older sibling to give advice and encouragement. They’re showing me that high school isn’t a bad place, and college isn’t a bad place.”
left Wende Valentine ’92, a major gifts officer for Water For People, a nonprofit agency that provides safe drinking water and sanitation for third world countries, visits Pathar Prathima on the Sundarban Islands in West Bengal, India.
r ight Wende Valentine ’92, second row, at Adhata Girls’ School in North 24 Parganas, West Bengal, India.
Choate’s ever-expanding service initiatives address a growing set of needs. While 71-year-old Mary Warner was making progress in her first-ever computer lesson, others arrived at the public library with computer woes that needed troubleshooting. Again, Choate students found that a little care and patience go a long way. One taught an out-of-work nurse how to dress up her résumé. Another helped a Brazilian immigrant search government web sites in a bid to rescue her frightened mother, who had left the United States to visit family in Brazil and couldn’t return home due to a visa mix up. In these times of tight public and household budgets, the need for community service work is only getting bigger, as many in the Choate community have learned first-hand. As they get involved, they’re finding they feel more complete, more in tune with what’s most important, and more equipped to pass down lessons about citizenship and responsibility. They’re also claiming anew the wisdom inside an old Choate tradition: the heart needs educating, too. And as it learns, it sings a more joyful song.