If you ask students on the Hill about their contributions to community service, you are likely to hear about their involvement in Colby Cares About Kids (CCAK) or the Colby Volunteer Center (CVC). Ask Sameera Anwar '10 that same question and she'll humbly say that she is on the board of directors at an orphanage that she helped found in Pune, India.

Anwar helped create the orphanage when she took a gap year before coming to the College. "[The orphanage] is really a home for street children," she says. "We would literally go around the city talking to children, seeing if they had a home or family." If the child in question had neither, Anwar and her colleagues worked to secure legal adoptive rights to bring the child to their school. From there, they would socialize the children and teach them, which often proved to be a daunting task.
Although Anwar is a talented linguist-she speaks English, Urdu, Hindi, Spanish and Arabic)-she "had no shared language" with one of the students she worked with, she says, as the student only spoke a dialect of Marathi. Nevertheless, Anwar did not give up. "We used lots of pictures," she says, and soon enough she and the student were able to communicate meaningfully.

The co-ed orphanage is now home to 12 children, aged two through 17. Anwar returned to the orphanage during the summers following her first two years at college, as well as during this past JanPlan; it continues to be a big part of her life.

In addition to her involvement with her charity overseas, Anwar works extensively with community service programs on the Hill. A sociology major with a minor in education, Anwar is the director of the student-run CVC, for which she organizes campus events and oversees 13 programs in the community. She is also on the advisory board for the local soup kitchen.

"We want to be helping hands for the community," Anwar says, when asked to explain the relationship between students involved with the CVC and the Waterville community at large. Anwar is also active in the CCAK program, where she is a board member as well as a mentor to a local student.

Anwar plans to further her commitment to service and teaching after graduation. She will work as a teacher to fourth grade students at the Fessenden School in Newton, Mass. The Fessenden School, which enrolls students in kindergarten through ninth grade, is the oldest all-male junior boarding school in the United States. Anwar speaks excitedly about this opportunity; the thought of living with and teaching a few hundred students does not faze her. After all, what are a couple of rambunctious schoolboys to a director of an orphanage?