First-year Lilian Gharios has already made her mark on Bowdoin’s campus. Between giving a Food for Thought lecture in February and starting a fundraising campaign for Iraqi refugees, Lilian is to be admired for her dedication to helping the Brunswick area and as well communities near her home in Aqaba, Jordan.
HC: In general, how do you like Bowdoin so far? Favorite memory?LG: “I’m enjoying Bowdoin so far. I think the best thing I like about Bowdoin so far is the variety of community service you can do and be involved with. To me, I love doing community service, so on the weekends, I’m always busy with community service. The best memory [I have is of] Bear Buddies. There’s this girl who’s five or six years old, and when she first came to Bear Buddies, she wouldn’t talk. She’s really shy, and she wanted me to carry her the whole time and she didn’t want to move, so we’d just sit there. Now, it’s been a couple of months since we’ve started and now she actually talks to a couple of people. She runs around and plays and, to me, it’s nice to see her change like that.”
HC: Can you tell me about your other community service initiatives like your fundraising campaign?LG: “So when I went home [to Aqaba, Jordan] over winter break, I visited a church with my aunt. There are a bunch of refugees in the hallways of churches — eighty-eight people in one church, and forty-six in the other. I asked my aunt, ‘What’s their story? Why do [you] keep visiting them?’ And she told me they were kicked out of Iraq by ISIS and an NGO helped them relocate to Jordan. But [the people] left their homes with nothing — no money, no clothes, nothing. Whatever they were wearing at the time, that’s all they came with to Jordan. And so my aunt and her friend were trying to raise money to help them buy clothes, medicine, and food. So when I came back here, I thought maybe there’s something Bowdoin can do to help them, because my aunt and her friend are not getting enough money. The snow shoveling was one of the fundraising ideas [I had] to raise money.”
HC: When did you start shoveling snow as part of your fundraising? Where do you shovel?LG: “I actually just recently started. We got back from winter break and I got the approval to do everything. That’s the first thing we did so far, shoveling snow last weekend. I have a gofundme website (http://www.gofundme.com/n1xnrc) where people can donate money there too, so people have been doing that. I asked someone who works on campus to post [on the faculty version of the Bowdoin Orbit] that if you want someone to shovel snow for you, contact Lilian. And then professors will contact me saying, ‘Oh, I want someone to shovel snow, how much are you charging?'”
HC: Who works with you?LG: “There are a couple students who volunteered. I gave a Food for Thought [lecture] and so in the Food for Thought, I told people to sign up to help if they were willing to shovel snow. There were twelve students who signed up, but I only needed three this weekend, because only two houses asked us to shovel snow. And so, this weekend three [freshman] students worked.”
HC: How much money have you raised so far?LG: “From the shoveling snow, I raised $125, which is good. On the gofundme website, we’re at $185 [now $895]. And it’s only been up for a while, so it’s good so far.”
HC: Where is the money going?LG: “To my aunt and her friends [and then to the refugees]. There’s no NGO helping those refugees right now, except my aunt and her friend.”
HC: What are you hopes for the future, especially when there’s no snow anymore? Would you like to continue fundraising?LG: “Yes, I still want to continue to raise money. I was thinking everyone does bake sales, so maybe that would work. And then I’m trying to think of events we can do, maybe have performances or speakers come or a play—students [could] make a play then charge for tickets—stuff like that. I still don’t know exactly what I want to do but I’m hoping to do a couple more events.”