At Your Service

To all of you who have been waiting in eager suspense, here it is:

I thought about writing about the portly officer who stalked my neighbor and I last Friday on the trail (or was it us stalking him?) but they say write about what you know, and since I don’t know much about portly police officers nor my neighbor, I thought I’d write about something I do know or at least about something of which I have a feeble inkling of its definition. No, I won’t make you suffer through the paper I wrote for Honors Service Learning, though if you ever happen to be within the confines of UT-Knoxville and have three extra hours available in your schedule, I highly recommend taking the class. Nor will I steal your time by posting my senior honors thesis upon the narrow-margined blog space. What I’m actually writing about is the events of this past weekend when four fearless first year students and I attempted to serve the Hispanic community at Scott’s Farm.
As an attempt to help the first year students accrue their ten hours of “Service Learning” credit for a useless class under the broad heading of “Behavioral Science,” I had arranged for them to work with the migrant clinic at Scott’s Farm, held every Sunday afternoon. After consulting with the directors as to how we could assist with the clinic, we decided to script and perform a series of skits to illustrate basic health and hygiene principles. Unbeknownst to me, not only does the class of 2009 have a plethora of students with a basic knowledge of Spanish, but it also contains many aspiring actors as well. When the time came for us to arrive at Scott’s we were well-prepared with our crazy props for protective clothing against pesticides, our glitter and soap for demonstrating “germenes” and handwashing, and a unrivaled cohort of medical actors destined for UniVision’s spin-off of ER. Everything was ready for a successful day of educating the migrant workers. Except…no one thought to ask the migrant workers what they really wanted to hear.
After setting up our props and commencing our soon-to-be award-winning performance, we began to notice that our stellar act was not so well-received. The workers fixed their eyes on us in meaningless gaze as we “educated” them about the importance of preventing pesticide exposure and washing one’s hands to prevent disease. As we went from dormitory to dormitory, the response was the same. Once, our pesticide skit garnered a few half-hearted applauses from a worker as his friend simultaneously saluted us with his half-empty beer can. In almost all aspects, it was a dismal failure.
Yet, some would consider our “service” as a great benefit to the community. We often confuse the term “service” with the term “doing a good deed.” We confuse the idea of helping someone with the feeling of being appreciated for what we have done. Those who go out into the world, enthusiastic in their desire to help but directionless and unaware of the actual need, are dangerous in their unguided efforts, sometimes causing more harm than benefit to those in need of service. Had someone actually taken the time to ask what the concerns of the workers were, they might have listened more intently to our performance. Maybe they would have told us what they really wanted to learn was how to stay hopeful and motivated in a situation where the only entertainment comes from disc of technology or metal cans of beverage. Maybe if we had taken the time to get to know a few of the workers beforehand, we wouldn’t have appeared as a barrage of arrogant “gringos” coming in to teach “those people” a thing or two about the quotidian events of their lives.
On the other hand, as we were driving back to campus, I realized that our efforts were not totally unsuccessful. The medical students learned something. Their eyes were opened to something they might not have even considered existent within Washington County. I heard many of the mention how they were inspired to consider the idea of studying abroad over the summer so that they could better communicate with those whom they served. That’s one of the fascinating aspects of service. Though you come to serve and teach others, those being served teach you about yourself and through your service you discover characteristics and talents that you didn’t even know you possessed. Service is not just about doing a “good deed” or practicing “random acts of kindness;” rather, it is about living a lifestyle of looking inward at oneself only to see what can be given outwardly to meet the needs of the one being served. I leave you with a few quotes from Robert Cole’s The Call of Service. I couldn’t have said it better myself:

“I think part of doing community service is this—to be stopped in your tracks sometimes because you’ve seen so much you ordinarily wouldn’t, and you take time out and try to look at that big picture you don’t even want to see.”

“We serve, and they serve us by coming here—giving us a chance to serve, and so offering a service to us.”

“You can learn a lot when you do this kind of work…but you can also learn about yourself, your own psychology and politics and values…and so while you’re doing, you’re learning, and when you go back to school, to college, when you resume learning, you can do so differently because of the doing…what you learn out there then becomes a part of you, and it gives some new assumptions or attitudes to you…”

“Maybe we spend so much time trying to be of help to them, we end up not thinking of the consequences—what we come to mean to them…They are our fellow human beings, and if we are to call ourselves Christians, they are the people Jesus would have us think about and try to be with.”