Service Update

My service site has been going very well fortunately. Working with kids down at the Multi-Cultural Center is very rewarding, but yet challenging in so many ways. It is rewarding because I have made bonds with the kids and they recognize me and get excited when I walk through the door. I am known as the “tall” one, and some of them always want me to pick them up so they can touch the ceiling. To save my back I tell them they only get one ‘pick-up’ a day which led to one little girl trying to bribe me with a piece of candy to pick her up twice. I must admit that at the beginning I felt stressed about having to go volunteer. I felt stressed because I thought of all the things that I have to get done and that I just don’t have time for this. Now, I look at my time spent volunteering as stress relief. It doesn’t matter how much I have to do or what’s on my mind about next year and grad school etc.; as soon as I enter the MFC, I forget about all that and I am there to have fun with the kids. This does not mean that the kids get a little rowdy sometimes, which can be stressful, but that is a different kind of stress. I think this means that I am getting a lot out of my service in ways that are often surprising and unexpected.
I don’t think that all of my service is stress relief though; a large portion of it is challenging on many levels. Since I am working with mostly inner city African American children, I am challenged with racism, which I have talked about in previous blogs. I am definitely not ready to answer those questions that have troubled me before, and I don’t know if I ever will, but I do think about them a lot, and not just when I am volunteering. The impact of this service has far extended the Multi-Cultural Center in the way I view the social world. Now I am constantly aware of how people treat people of a different race or social background, and especially how I treat them. I’ve always believed that not all people start out on the same level in life, some started lower than others because of factors such as race, socio-economic class, etc. However, I didn’t understand the full implications of this injustice in society until I was able to work with the kids at the MFC. It’s almost impossible to say that a child is the cause of their own suffering so it brings up questions about why they are treated differently when they are just like any other innocent kid. The only difference between these kids and my childhood is 1. My family had more money and 2. I am white. These two factors automatically judge how people would look at me as a child and how they would look at a child from the MFC. I believe that the kids at the MFC have just as much potential as I did, and, sadly, they have to work twice as hard for society to see that potential.