Volunteering programs for students - part two

During the second year of my degree I worked with an 11 year old boy from a very difficult family. He had been ill for around two years before I started to work with him. He had had a cancer and all the time was at had been hospitalised. The year when I spent with him was his first year at school after the disease. He also had behavior and learning problems, so he was attending the special education class. My job was to help him to study, with homework and adaptation, and during our free time we would do anything we wanted. It was extremely difficult because his family had complicated conditions. His parents don't even know how to read and write, and almost don't work (I thought there were no such families in the 21st century in a modern and highly developed country). His father had just returned from the prison where he was incarcerated for drug dealing, and from what I understand, he continues with it. They had no ability to help to the boy. So you can figure out what level of education, culture and behavior this family has. Anyway, it's very different from mine, so it was complicated and challenging to find the common language with both the child and their parents. But mostly we had had a good time, especially during the summer vacation when we had less homework and could spend time at the swimming pool or walking in the park or something else. After a year I was so tired of the boy (and especially from his strange parents), that I decided to change and work with adults. You can choose a new activity every year, and I've chose to help to students from my major with studying. I liked it a lot; I worked with the same couple of students, four hours a week with each one, throughout the whole year, so I have seen how our meetings helped them to improve their grades, to understand the material and to organize their time to study effectively. It was satisfying and not as hard as work with children. So I have been with this project for two years.
I think this system is very useful for both sides - the needy person gets free and quality help, and a student gets a possibility to earn for the study doing a relatively small number of working hours.