Serving up summer
September 2009 - The Coloradan

During the summer when you were 20, anything was possible. You held your first job, maybe went to war, fell in love, lived with good friends and an overflowing sink of dirty dishes and volunteered to make the world a better place. Without fail, September called you back to campus with its cool nights, engaging classes and spirited football games. And life marched on.

The rest is history, except that every year, CU students travel the paths you wore down, journeying to organic farms thriving off of hope, villages tucked in the rugged Himalayas and towns dotted across sun-scorched Africa. The students are chasing that same sense of promise and possibility you followed, hoping to hold onto it. They, like you, realize youthful optimism can fade in time like a comet's trail across the black night sky.

More than 13,000 students on the CU-Boulder campus volunteer in some way, either through class work, programs, student group activities or on their own. Some of their stories follow in the next five pages. You may recognize yourself or the self you wanted to be when you were young and the world rolled out its red carpet. So, here's a curtain call to all those carefree days lingering in the backstage of your memories and to these students who have scripted ways to make summer's lessons stretch far beyond them.

- Tori Peglar

Mark Arnoldy faced a life-death situation during his first trip to Nepal in 2007. Severely allergic to nuts, he accidentally ate food prepared with nut sauce.

Unable to reach a hospital because of a countrywide strike, he survived because of a bottle of Benadryl . But his near-death experience helped him empathize with each Nepali child who dies every 14 minutes from poor nutrition and access to treatment.

Ironically, the food that could kill Arnoldy can save thousands of lives, as it is recommended by international aid agencies to fight malnutrition. Because fortified peanut butter is not a Nepalese diet staple, Arnoldy, with the help of Himalayan HealthCare, spent his summer speaking with rural villagers, aiming to educate people to think of peanut butter as an essential medicine.

“If we can guarantee our children the right a life free of malnutrition, what else in the world matters?” says the senior psychology major.

Follow Arnoldy on Twitter at markarnodly and NepalNUTrition.

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