With four final exams and a paper due before Christmas break, Amy Liang devoted every free minute to studying.
Except for one very special block of time.
Liang's Saturday mornings, without exception, belong to the homeless men and women of Winston-Salem. For the past four years, Liang, 21, has participated in Wake Saturdays, a student-led organization that serves meals on Patterson Avenue to the city's homeless.
Beyond serving food, the program stresses building relationships with the men, women and children who stop by for meals.
Liang used to fret that the program ate up too much of her Saturdays.
"I can't think of it as time away from studying, but as, 'This is how I spend my Saturdays,'" Liang said. "These are things that are really important."
For her work with Wake Saturdays and other programs focusing on homelessness, Liang was recently given a Community Impact Student Award, which Gov. Bev Perdue gives each year to 20 college students in the state.
Liang has become well-known among some of the city's advocates for the homeless, including Willis Miller, the assistant director for Samaritan Ministries. While some well-intentioned students may show up to serve in the ministries' soup kitchen for a few months before losing interest, Liang's commitment has been unwavering, he said.
"Each year, she keeps coming back. That, in itself, shows that she really likes the people she's working with. She's got a good attitude and is a well-focused young lady," Miller said. "She has been a blessing to us."
A senior from Kingsport, Tenn., Liang is majoring in biology, but her real interest is sociology, her minor. That field of study allows her to study disparities among humans, quantify with the help of statistics and try to come up with solutions.
"It's a wonderful avenue to effect change," Liang said.
Although she was not exposed to homelessness in Kingsport, Liang came to Wake Forest University with a burgeoning interest in volunteering. As a freshman, she spent one night a month at Samaritan Ministries' shelter on Patterson Avenue and found she enjoyed her conversations with the homeless men.
"You hear the numbers and the stats," Liang said, "but you forget it's people who are stuck in this situation."
Last year, she made a documentary about the city's homeless and, over the summer, she used a research grant from the university to study links between diabetes and homelessness.
That research, which grew out of her conversations with the homeless at Wake Saturdays, involved interviewing homeless people and talking to them about the food they ate at area soup kitchens. She learned that most eat a diet rich in starch and low in fiber.
Many homeless are amputees who have lost a limb because of complications from diabetes. That kind of condition creates a barrier for someone trying to escape homelessness, Liang said.
She has accumulated her data but is still researching possible solutions. Simply adding more sugar-free foods is not an option for most cash-strapped soup kitchens and shelters, she said.
After graduating in the spring, Liang would like to stay in Winston-Salem for another year and, with the help of grant money, introduce some viable solutions.
In Baltimore, for instance, fruits and vegetables from a large garden within the city are used to feed the homeless.
"I'm not sure how something like that would work here, but it's a starting point," Liang said.
She eventually plans to go to graduate school, possibly medical school, to study public health.
"This has definitely shaped what I want to do," Liang said.
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