How does service relate to learning?
Until the fall of last year, and my arrival at Ambrose I would have found this question much more difficult to answer. I saw the two ideas as separate entities; learning was something I could achieve, something insular and personal, while service was something people on the news did. Service was going to a distant land and helping those in severe sickness or poverty. It was something I'd always admired, but never thought related to my own learning. When I arrived at Ambrose, fresh from across the pond, I was informed I would have to partake in a day of community service called "Urban Plunge" at the time it felt like a massive hindrance and learning something from the day seemed like a very unlikely outcome. Our group was assigned to a warehouse in Rock Island belonging to a company called 'World Relief'. Here's how it went.
I have to admit when I first set eyes on the uninspiring brick exterior of the World Relief centre in Rock Island, I wasn’t exactly jumping for joy. As we piled off the yellow school bus I’d seen in a hundred hollywood films, I didn’t really know how to feel. “You’ll just be cleaning out an old warehouse” was the only clue I had received about what exactly my Urban Plunge would entail. The smiling face that greeted us inside could not have been more opposed to the bland exterior of the building, she seemed genuinely pleased to see us and was sure we could be a real help. The work wasn’t flattering, moving dusty old furniture from its current jumbled home, out in to the yard and returning it in an organised system so it could be accessed and removed easily. The furniture was to be given to refugee families who were arriving in the States with absolutely nothing. To me it looked like dusty 2nd (or more likely 7th) hand furniture, but to these people it must seem the height of luxury. Before we arrived in Rock Island, I’d felt like a refugee myself. My dorm room on campus 4000 miles from home was a refugee camp in an alien culture; even the aforementioned yellow bus held me in awe. As I perspired in the humidity and the Iowan sun, the blisters started forming on my hands from carrying ancient TV’s, I began to find some perspective. Yes, I’d moved from one culture to its slightly more brash, non-identical twin. But had I fled from terror, through more terror and a language barrier into a world that was completely alien? A world where nobody understood me? A world where I couldn’t FaceTime home, because the family I’d left behind had luxuries like occasionally clean water, not iPhones? When I asked myself these questions, I savoured the sweat, the blisters and the morning of my time, they seemed like easy gifts to give to those less fortunate than myself.
Service itself can be a learning process. It teaches humility and perspective and it teaches us the power of giving up our time. Although we only spent two hours in the warehouse, the 25 of us who pitched in achieved an awful lot. I came to realise that if everyone can do a small service to the people around them every day, the world would become a much more uplifting place.
