While she was an undergraduate, Faith E. Adiele '86-'87 and several other Phillips Brooks House (PBH) volunteers took the subway from Harvard Square to a seedy part of Dorchester every week.

They walked past a gauntlet of Irish bars, past drunk men hunching on stoops in mid-morning, until they arrived at the place where they met with the families of Laotian refugees.

Volunteers would take the refugees out for ice cream and listen as they described the suffering they had endured because of oppression in their homeland.

But, after a time, Adiele began to question the relevance of her involvement and change her view on public service in general, because of two events which occured in the refugees' neighborhood and demonstrated what she saw as systematic oppression.

The first incident occurred when a teenage girl from a refugee family was forced to marry an older American who had gotten to know the girl through his work with a service organization.

Since the man was from a higher socioeconomic class and was willing to spend time with them, the parents believed they were obliged to let him marry their daughter.

Around the same time, Adiele remembers a different incident when a black man was thrown under the subway by frequenters of the area bars and killed.

"It occurred to me that there were so many things going on [racism, sexism and language barriers] that there was no way taking the kids out for ice cream was going to change long-range what the issues were," says Adiele, the former coordinator of Education for Action and now a visiting professor at Framingham State College.

Today, she believes that volunteering to help underprivileged communities can actually perpetuate problems because it does not address the basic societal inequities, since volunteers do not generally help to alter class discrepancies.

"Service relies on the whims of those in power to go in and help people," Adiele says, adding that she thinks undergraduates volunteer for PBH programs because they require minimal commitment and offer immediate gratification.

While saying the programs can be beneficial since they expose undergraduates to poor communities and can help some neighborhoods, she firmly believes that such service projects are meaningless unless undergraduates use the experiences they garner while volunteering to affect institutional change in the future.

Are Their Efforts Worth It?

About 25 percent of Harvard undergraduates volunteer for a PBH program, while others are involved in activist initiatives like Harvard-RadCliffe. Amnesty International. Students volunteer for projects that range from tutoring elementary school students once a week to serving in soup kitchens, to writing letters on behalf of political prisoners.

The problems Adiele came to recognize are not unique. Many undergraduates during their tenure at PBH wonder how much their efforts really matter, yet few seem to come to Adiele's cynical conclusion.

At a Harvard-Radcliffe Amnesty International meeting a few weeks ago, a new member asked if the organization could prove that their efforts were having a positive effect.

"I didn't immediately know how to respond," says Bella K. Sewall '98, the group's co-president.