High School Portfolio Website

Volunteer work during my highschool years

German Society for peripartal Health Promotion

The German Society for Peripartal Health Promotion (DGPPG) is a German non-for-profit Society that aims to help women around childbirth, especially by promoting the Dutch model of maternity care nurses who support all Dutch families after the birth of a child. They not only help with cleaning and cooking, but also keep an eye on the mother's health and how to care for the newborn. I have been building and maintaining the website and the learning platform.

Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg helps to make books available to the entire world. You can volunteer by proofreading books - I am fluent in 3 languages - or by helping them find donations to keep this important work going.

Volunteering for a farm in dire circumstances

I helped a very nice, widowed acquaintance, after we heard that her mother had died in the months previously, who had always helped her on the farm. Her husband had badly mistreated her and had left her eventually after having thrown her from the stairs for the last time, leaving her with two small children and a small farm to manage, all on her own, with only the help of her elderly mother. Less than two years later her mother died of cancer.

She got up every morning, to help the children go to school, feed all the animals, clean the stables, clean and preparing the horses for children with riding lessons, getting them to the stables again, preparing another round of food, feed children etc. etc. We saw that she was running around the entire time on her own, with only her 5- and 7-year-old children to help and I decided to help her with feeding the horses, cleaning the stable and preparing for riding lessons, as much as I could for the time we were there.

Family in need

During the Covid-19 pandemic I was wondering how I would be able to spend my volunteering hours, but unfortunately, fate had it otherwise. My dear grandmother had a stroke and became immobile. Because I spent much time with her in the Netherlands, I did many of the things she couldn't do, including once putting a dislocated finger right after she had fallen. Other things I did were doing the grocery shopping, helping her when thirsty, sawing down branches of trees, removing 8 loads of trees, leaves and other material from the garden. I did doing many odds and ends around the house and also helped with physical therapy sometimes, for example if they could not help my grandmother stand up alone. And I helped when my grandparents had fallen down, because they couldn't get up by themselves.