DISCOURAGED volunteers are the Major Irritant of the Week.

Sometimes, it's easy for volunteers to get discouraged. I remember once I was volunteering with a student in the presence of another volunteer and his student. The volunteer was trying to help the student through a difficult patch in the textbook.

"Come on, you can do it. It's not hard," the volunteer said. Clearly, the student did not agree.

He shook his head and slumped to the desk. His behaviour wasn't bad, merely defeated.

Suddenly the volunteer said: "That's it then, I'm done." The volunteer picked up his things and marched out, leaving the child sitting there. It was obvious that the volunteer didn't intend to come back. What the volunteer didn't see was the way the child watched him leave with big, sad eyes. The student turned to me: "Could you help me with this?"

He pushed his textbook towards me. I looked at the work, but it was in an area that I wasn't particularly good at in school, myself. I shrugged, helplessly. "I'm sorry," I said. "Maybe if you apologised to the volunteer, they'll come back. I haven't heard the car yet. You could still catch him."

The student rested his head on the table. His pride was too great, and he'd been walked out on too many times before.

Although I think the volunteer made the wrong decision, I don't blame him. It's so easy to get discouraged. There are rarely any immediate paybacks. Sometimes volunteering can be the most thankless task you can take up. It's hard. You're sitting there with this mouthy kid, or a child who speaks a language of shrugs. You think, I could be at home drinking hot chocolate and watching soap operas. I could be helping my own kids. I could be catching up on all the work I haven't done yet.

But sometimes there are paybacks, and they often come at the strangest moments.

Last week, I was invited to a party at my friend's boyfriend's parent's house in Brighton, Massachusetts. I'd only met the boyfriend, Jay, once before. Jay is Chinese-American, and my friend had conned his parents into making something called Dahbeenlo or Chinese fondue or hotpot.

Basically, there's a large pot of hot water. You dip various vegetables, fishballs, squid and other delicacies into the hot water, swirl it around for a minute or so, fish it out and eat it. Normally, it's something done only with family for special occasions.

The meal was delicious. At the end of the night, Jay's little sister came in. She was 18, and had been out with her friends. Her parents were over the moon because she'd just had early acceptance to Harvard University. She sat down with us.

"I don't know," she said, "my parents want me to go to Harvard and that's it. It's all about rankings for them. What if I'm not happy at Harvard? They don't understand that, though. They say I can be happy I go to Harvard."

She tentatively wanted to study medicine. As she talked, she looked over at me.

"You look familiar," she said. "I used to know someone who was from Bermuda."

"Wait a minute," I said. "Did you used to go to the 'X' Elementary school in Boston?"

She nodded eagerly. I was a classroom volunteer there seven years ago when I was an undergraduate in college.

Suddenly, I remembered this tiny, 11-year-old Chinese-American girl looking up at me.

"I want to be a doctor," she said then. "What courses should I take when I get to middle school?"

I told her to take biology and chemistry. Now, here we were, through some bizarre twist of fate, sitting at the same table.

"You sent me a postcard from Bermuda," she said now. "Oh ? my ? God! I can't believe you're sitting here. I've got to go call all my old elementary school friends."

She told me that her class loved it when I came to work with them. It was a strange thing, because I always thought I wasn't making much of a difference. Basically, I went every week and looked at their little essays.

I made suggestions, I talked to them, I lent some of them books that I'd brought from home, like the and the . That was basically it. It never seemed like very much. Eventually, I graduated and went back to Bermuda. I had a postcard from one of the students and that was it. I never expected to see any of them again. Strangest of all, this particular girl and her friend were the ones I remembered most clearly.

It was so wonderful to know that she was doing well and still wanted to be a doctor. It was one of those rare, payback moments. It made it all worthwhile.