Law School Personal Statement - Help!!!

In conjunction with my last post, I am placing my rough draft of my law school personal statement here hoping some of you will please assist me in making it stellar. Remember they like stories (or so I'm told) and they like a theme. I'm writing to answer the question "why I want to go to law school?" ( Reminiscent of the ever popular grade school essay "what I did this summer.") If you didn't know me what would your impressions be. Don't just compliment me to be nice, seriously I need some critics. THANK YOU!

The first time I walked into the refugee camp I knew my world, as I had previously interpreted it, was gone. I slowly felt my comfortable ignorance of suffering shed away leaving me exposed to life's basest ugliness - man's inhumanity to man. I had been asked by a new acquaintance to bring a few games to entertain some 100 refugee children who were stuck at this frigid camp one hour North of Moscow, Russia (a city thousands of miles from their homes among the mountains of Afghanistan). He escorted me into the room where the children were awaiting my arrival. The walls were cracked, their plaster gone, exposing the bare cement underneath. The lack of insulation allowed me to see my nervous breath as I ascended the stairs. I could hear the children before I saw them, small little voices trying to keep one another quiet in the excitement of a visitor. When I entered the room a sea of deep brown eyes turned my way, curious about the strange American standing before them. My counterpart introduced me in Russian (a second language to myself and the children seated before me) and told me I could begin when I was ready. I soon found that I needn't have prepared such an elaborate presentation; these emaciated children devoured every game I played, every story I told and every skit I preformed as though they were experiencing childhood for the first time.

The pivotal moment came when, after the 'show,' I presented the children with bags of cookies I had purchased before leaving Moscow that morning. I began distributing the cookies to the outstretched, scabies-ridden fingers. The children ate them with intensity, continually asking for "one more please." In their excitement they began to crowd closer and closer to me, until I was backed into a table that was placed against a corner of the room. Such was their intensity that, to keep from being crushed, I had to climb on top of the table to continue distributing the cookies. From my perch I looked out at their faces which were so happy and yet so desperate for something I took for granted, and I knew that I had come upon something that would forever alter the path of my life.

I would spend several days each week for the remainder of my tenure in Moscow with these refugee children and others like them at various camps. I would sit and listen as young Afghan women explained to me the horrors they had fled and the difficulties they faced living in a country hostile to their presence as refugees. I hugged a sobbing Iraqi who told me of the horrors of war, her dead family, and the ache she had inside for her mangled country. I would have women offer me their children thinking I could provide them with a better life in America than they could in a refugee camp. During these moments I would resolve time and time again to never forget these experiences and that I would do everything in my power to help them and the millions of refugees like them the world over.

Upon returning to the United States I was faced with a series of tough decisions. I was two years into a degree in Theater Arts (a life long passion of mine) but I felt I could not be an effective advocate without more specified training. Thus I transferred Universities and degrees, in a sense saying goodbye to my former life. I was able to throw myself head first in to my studies and produce above satisfactory results academically. This life altering experience is evident if one looks at the pattern my grades took between my first and second Universities.

Upon graduating cum laude with many academic honors and extra curricular awards I decided it was necessary to broaden my understanding of the world and my place in it. So, I joined the U.S. Peace Corps and have been serving the people formerly marginalized by the Apartheid government of South Africa for the past year and a half.*** These new experiences have served to make me all the more passionate about upholding and supporting human rights at home and abroad. I am gaining an invaluable understanding of the effects of injustice and what is necessary to reverse the degrading cycle of oppression.

Yet through it all I have not forgotten those secret promises I made to myself to help refugees the world over. My ambition to practice asylum law stems from my desire to be in a position to assist my friends and all those who search for security. This goal makes up the very essence of who I am.

895 words

***It will have been a year and a half by the time I submit this