Story of Service Past and Hopes for the Future

I’ve been doing service work ever since I was seven years old. I use to hate it. My mom would make me and my sisters go to cook and serve food to the homeless with the help of nuns from the order Mother Theresa had started. I didn’t like being around people I didn’t know, so serving food to them was nowhere near my ideal situation. I used to fight my mom about going, but she would pour on the Catholic guilt, and I would end up going twice a month.

I don’t remember much for my childhood, but my most vivid memory comes from serving with the nuns. When I was eight, I accidentally stumbled upon one of them comforting a crying woman. The woman was sobbing because she had just lost everything. She kept repeating that over and over, “I’ve lost everything.” At the time, it terrified me about losing I had, but I like to think that time has given me a slightly wiser view of the situation. It did end up helping me appreciate what I had.

We moved from Memphis to Chicago when I was nine, and no longer had to help the nuns. That makes me sound like a terrible person who hates helping people, but at nine I would have much rather been hanging out with my friends. My twin sister and I would occasionally ask people to bring toiletry items for the local women’s shelter rather than presents for our birthdays, but other than that we didn’t do much service work until high school.

In high school, I went to a private school in (what was then) a not-so-great area of Chicago. Nearby was a mostly underprivileged, Hispanic neighborhood. I would go to be a tutor there once a week for the first three years of high school. I would end up having the same child every week, so I go to know them pretty well (it was a new child every year). Whenever I was sick and would miss a week, the kids would always be very upset with me and give me a lecture. I tried as hard as I could not to miss a single week. The hardest part was listening to the difficult things these children had to put up with (relatives in prison, uninvolved parents, monetary issues… my first student even got third degree burns from something a relative had done to her) and responding properly. We were told the best way was just to help them focus on their work and report anything truly terrible. Although responding calmly was usually difficult, it was one of the best and only ways I found effective in dealing with these issues.

I haven’t been able to get into service work as much in college, though my mother did find a branch of Mother Theresa’s nuns in Chicago, so I help her the weeks that I’m at home.

I do hope to be able to help in some way through this service project. I know that in order to do so, I’ll have to learn more about the community. Without knowing anything about the community, there’s no way I can even help plan something that will help the church reach out more. My first goal is to learn more about the community.

I also will have to learn about the church- teachings, past, and current activities. Though I know about the Catholic teachings and some non Christian religions, such as Hinduism, I’m not as familiar with Protestant religions. I look forward to learning more about the church’s teachings. Without this knowledge, I won’t be able to help the church either.

I hope to grow in communicating with other people. Though I have come a long way since the age of seven, I still am shy when I’m not in a familiar setting. I feel sometimes like I’m missing out on something by not communicating with more people. I think this experience will help me branch out more.

I know that within the next few months we won’t be completely turning the community around and cause everyone to join the church, but I would like to help start something that could become something much more. I know how something small can turn into something big.

I look forward to the coming months. From past experience, I know that you can’t really know what to expect during service work. It should be interesting to see what happens.