He estimates that he has written more than 500 letters on behalf of prisoners of conscience.
"It's difficult to know exactly what difference your letter is making," he says. "It's quite obvious that the sum total of Amnesty letters in all these cases is making an impact on world human rights."
According to Zaitchik, after Amnesty wrote letters on behalf of Turkish prisoners who were on a hunger strike last summer, the Turkish government compromised and ended the strike.
"It happens time and time again," he says.
An Academic Perspective
The problems facing undergraduates involved in service have long been recognized by social scientists.
According to such academics, often the only way to evaluate the impact of public service and activism is by asking the clients and the volunteers whether they feel better after participating in the program.
"Social scientists don't have the methodology powerful enough to know whether there has been a more profound effect on the person who has experienced the benevolent help," says Jerome Kagan, Starch Professor of Psychology and a member of the faculty committee on public service.
According to Kagan, people are frequently helped simply because they feel better after volunteers have spent time with them, while the volunteers themselves benefit psychologically as well.
"There is a symbiotic effect because most people have a strong moral sense and wish to feel that they're doing what is right," Kagan says.
He adds that the psychological effects of the work on both parties are as important as any statistical data (like grade reports from a tutoring program) that shows the success of public service.
Theda Skocpol, chair of the faculty committee on public service, agrees that statistics are affected by factors other than public service and therefore do not give an accurate representation of its effect.
"A service provider can usually tell, not on a given day but over a period of time, whether what they're doing connects with the people they're working with," she says. "Usually people get a lot of satisfaction out of the human contact, and that usually sustains them."
Volunteers Push On
In the end, however, students are forced to resolve for themselves the effectiveness of their work. For many it is impossible to isolate how much of what they do is undertaken to assuage their own feelings of guilt and how much out of a passionate desire to help others.
Still, some manage to keep the faith that their actions are making a real difference.
Sewall, the Amnesty co-chair, echoes this sentiment.
"What keeps me motivated is knowing that if I were being tortured, or if I had been imprisoned for something that I had said, I would want someone to write a letter for me," she says. "Just knowing that I have a chance to possibly stop torture or to stop what I see as gross injustice, even if there's a slight chance that something I do helps, makes it worth it."
But, still, even she has her doubts. "There are so many things that people who are activist-minded could do, so the question isn't 'Is this effective sometimes?' It's 'Is it really worth it?"" she wonders. "Is it just going to make me feel better?"