By Jared Sugerman, News Staff

Helen, a blind woman with short dark hair and missing teeth, lies upon a bed, her eyes directed away from the camera.
‘Ami tomake Bhalo Basi’ she says, pausing between each Bengali word as a disembodied voice repeats after her.
‘I love you,’ replies Missy Elumba, as Helen’s face is lifted by a contented smile.
Elumba, a senior forward on the women’s hockey team, spent the summer of 2008 caring for the sick in Kolkata, India, where she found ways to communicate with Helen and other patients, despite a language barrier.
‘I learned some Bengali as I went, but for the most part, you just needed to show your love,’ Elumba said.
A member of the class of 2009, Elumba will leave Northeastern in May with a degree in health sciences. She may also graduate as a winner of the Hockey Humanitarian Award, for which she was a finalist in 2008 and is once again in 2009.
According to the Hockey Humanitarian website, the award is meant ‘to acknowledge the accomplishments of personal character, scholarship, and the giving of oneself off the ice to the larger community as well.’
Though he did not play hockey, Tito Elumba showed his generosity by encouraging females in Cottage Grove to participate like his 8-year-old daughter, Missy. He used his own basement as a warehouse and fitting room for hockey gear that would be loaned to girls who did not have their own equipment.
Elumba said she could not fully appreciate the benefits of doing charitable work until her second year at Northeastern, however. After a knee injury forced her to red-shirt during her rookie season, she struggled through life without hockey, until she was led to Community of Faith Christian Fellowship, where she discovered a church-going family that provided her with a new sense of purpose.
‘When I feel like I’m getting turned inward, I just immediately have to go outward and I think that’s where the service thing goes,’ she said.
Elumba’s Hockey Humanitarian Award resume includes volunteering at 11′ organizations, three of which she is still active in as she finishes her fifth year at Northeastern. After she receives her diploma, she will not attend medical school as she had once planned. Instead, Elumba will go to a missionary training school, where she said she will prepare for what she hopes is a long career in the missionary field.
‘I think it’s been cool for her teammates to see, especially in her, just that love to serve people and walk out the things that you see in the Bible, like going to help the sick and going to help the poor,’ said Elumba’s former Northeastern teammate and fellow member of the class of 2009, Sarah Belliveau.
Elumba spent the better part of 15 years following coach’s orders and game plans. Now, she listens to a different voice, she said.
‘We can’t really control what’s going to happen, so I’ll just stick with hanging out with God for today and doing what he’s telling me to do right now,’ Elumba said. ‘And then, he’ll guide me for the next things.