Stephanie is a part-time performance poet and full-time law student living in London. She volunteers at the Advisory Service for Squatters where she helps advise squatters and homeless people in the UK and sometimes gets invited to their parties in return. She also plays in a samba band. She hopes to spend less time on social media and more time creating lasting things in 2013.
The most
enlightening community service trip I ever went on was also the last service
trip I ever went on, all thanks to what someone said on the first night.
It was the
Christmas break of my second year studying in the US. I was on a service trip
with a group of around 12 students from my university in small-town Ohio. We
were going volunteer in a neighbourhood in inner-city Chicago, known for having
one of the highest rates of gun crime and murder in the US. We were going there
for a week to help out at an after-school centre and get involved in outreach
work with an organization which worked with former gang members educate
communities about gun violence. The trip was organized by two students from my
university, a girl from a suburb of Ohio and a guy (I’ll call him C) who had
grown up in the neighbourhood himself. We would later find out he had lost his
father and friend to gang violence when he was younger.
It was our first
night staying in the small after-school community centre. We were having a reflection session sitting
in a circle in the classroom to talk about our experiences and how we felt. We
had dutifully shut the curtains on all the windows for security reasons. We
were still overwhelmed. We had arrived at the school in the afternoon, after a
9h drive from our university. The
supervisors and the 40 kids in the after-school program had arrived a
few hours later, and we ran around all evening trying to make ourselves useful
and make friends with them. At least, that’s what I saw.
It came to C’s
turn to speak. Everyone before him had said more or less the same things (how
they had been excited, nervous, tired, etc.). He said simply “To be honest, you
people disgust me. I saw it this evening. The way you looked at the kids I grew
up with, my community, and how we live. I saw it in your eyes…the pity, the way
you judged us…I felt sick.”
That’s probably
the last thing anyone wants to hear on a voluntary service trip, least of all
from the leader of the trip. But it did spark a heavy discussion. Again, the
context: he was an African-American who grew up in a rough neighbourhood who
had taken two car loads of largely-privileged, mostly white, upper-middle class
students (his friends) from his private university in a pretty town to a part
of Chicago they would otherwise never set foot in, to meet (and ‘help’) the
people he had grown up with. He was in a strange position: both belonging to
the group of volunteers and the group of people being ‘helped’. There were
bound to be some discomforting moments for everyone.
We understood
that what he said wasn’t personal: it was just how he felt that day. And what
he noticed. A few people tried to explain that it a lot of it also had to do
with trying to make a good impression in a new environment, it did not
necessarily mean we were looking down on them. Someone suggested that maybe we
all should think about why we were on a service trip in the first place. The
thing was, even if none of the volunteers felt like they were actively judging
anyone that day, the fact that he felt the need to bring it up did raise issues
about who we thought we were and what we thought we were doing. Did we see
ourselves as saviours? As superior? Was the very act of going on a service trip,
as one guy pointed out, a way of saying ‘I am better, richer and smarter than
you, that’s why I have the time to go to your home to help you’?
The
rest of the trip went all right, there were no hard feelings but a new, humbled
kind of awareness. The people we made friends with in Chicago on the pretext of
‘helping’ didn’t really need us, but were glad that a group of people from a
world far removed from theirs could be bothered to visit them and lend a hand.
And who doesn’t benefit from making connections with people?
That
was the last short service trip I went on. I guess it made me think too much
about my privilege and place in the world, and the best way to change it What I
took from it was the idea that we as volunteers were not that special nor
vital, and would never change the world with a weeklong holiday. In my view, if
you really want to make some sort of impact on injustice, long-term volunteering
in the place where you live is a better use of time, even if it does sound less
exciting.
Having said
this, I don’t regret going on any of the service trips I have been on. And I
would encourage you to go on one if you’ve never been on one before. Learn, be
humbled, make friends, return with stories. Just don’t kid yourself that that
is all you owe the world, that the world is somehow a much better place, or
that you are a better person because you decided to have a different kind of
holiday. Read the history of the place, keep informed about the place long
after you have left. Stay in touch with whoever you met. Be mindful of how you
were able to go on the trip in the first place, how you presented yourself, why
you were doing it. Stay uncomfortable. Don’t just be grateful for what you
have, think about why you have it and ‘they’ don’t. Don’t stop thinking.
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"The Action Collective" features six guests involved in humanitarian and environmental work. Next Wednesday, we'll have Farhan M.
