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Earlham Senior Selected for For Immediate Release: 
Kathryn "Kat" Bearese sits between two of the children she assisted during her off-campus study in Mexico. RICHMOND, Ind. — Kathryn "Kat" Bearese has a passion for serving people with special needs. Her enthusiasm for service helped her to be named a Bonner Scholar at Earlham and now has helped her to win a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship of $10,000 to spend three months in Quito, Ecuador, during the fall of 2008. "The thing that excites me the most is experiencing a new culture," says Bearese, a senior psychology major from Hagerstown, Md. "I will be studying Spanish, and I hope to find an opportunity to volunteer with special needs because that's my passion." As a Bonner Scholar, Bearese found her niche volunteering at Achieva Resources, a Richmond organization that offers services to help people with special needs achieve greater personal, social and economic success. "The special needs population is one that's not given enough attention," she says. "It's unknown or mysterious, and sometimes it's just forgotten. The reason I love to be around people with special needs is because they help me to realize what's really important in life. You can get so caught up in the material world, or stressing about a test, but when I spend time with them, I realize that I'm someone with just as many needs as anyone else. I can teach them, and they can teach me. I have learned that we can all help each other." At Achieva, Bearese leads activities in the Adult Room, and some of the "consumers" earn spending money by working in a workshop. "They do simple things like putting roses in boxes during Valentine's Day or other simple tasks that are repetitive and monotonous," she says. "They are so happy to do the work that we don't want to do. They are grateful to have something to do." This past summer she worked at a camp that operated a vacation beach house for people with special needs. She's excited because she's been asked to return next summer to run the beach house. During the first semester of her junior year, Bearese participated in Earlham's off-campus program in Mexico where she volunteered at a school for special needs children. She also has helped with Special Olympics during her time at Earlham. Before high school, Bearese spent six years in the Middle East including a year and a half in Bahrain, a small island in the Persian Gulf east of Saudi Arabia, where she volunteered twice a week to help feed, clean and walk the animals in a shelter. "I guess this was really the first volunteer experience that I had," she says. "I loved living in the Middle East, I still consider it more home to me than any other place that I have lived. Although I speak very few words of Arabic, I love the language and culture." Before enrolling at Earlham, Bearese spent a year after high school volunteering with Americorps, where she says she found her passion for service. However, she credits her grandfather with planting the seed of service in her life. "He was very active in fighting hunger," she says. "He was one of the organizers of the CROP (Communities Responding to Overcome Poverty) Walk." Bearese says the Rotary experience seemed like a great next step for combining service and Spanish language skills, which she began studying during her second year at Earlham. "I will be living with a host family and I hope I will become fluent in Spanish," she says. "The number of people I will be able to help will increase ten fold because of the large number of people who speak Spanish in the United States." Her background of service and living internationally helped qualify Bearese for the Rotary Scholarship, but she says a story from her Mexico experience may have sealed the deal. One of the questions during the scholarship interview asked about her impression of the Rotary Club and its work. While volunteering in Mexico, Bearese saw that the two wheelchairs used by the school had stickers on the back that said the Rotary Club had donated them. "I think it impressed them that I had this first-hand knowledge and that I understood and appreciated what they were doing," she says. — EC — Contact:
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Earlham
College · 801 National Road West · Richmond,
Indiana 47374-4095 |