Service

Today I ended my year of service with AmeriCorps.  It was a whirlwind year, mainly because I quite typically had to make things very very hard on myself by getting married and having a second (and third and fourth) job.  I gained so much experience in knowledge about working with young kids, working with difficult people, among others.

But most importantly, my year got me thinking about what this whole idea of "service" is.  I love the idea of volunteering and serving other people.  I am fully in support of anything that will help another human being, a community, or the planet.  But, sadly, there also seems to be some hidden assumptions to the idea of service that make me uneasy sometimes.  Service implies an already preexisting power structure, but one that can work both ways.  On the one end you have the lower serving the higher--a waiter serves his customers food, a butler serves the master of the house, etc.  On the other end you have the higher serving the lower--non-community volunteers taking trash out of rundown neighborhoods, volunteers bagging food at the food pantry, etc.  Most of the service from this past year could be classified under the second type, albeit without most of the sinister overtone of the "lower/higher" distinction.  I say "without most" because there were definitely times that, when not perhaps sinister, the intentions behind our service to a particular community with ignorant and ill-informed.  Certainly, intentions are good, but what of the results of said service?  What if (as I believe will happen with a few of our projects) the long-last effects are few or even non-existent? 

Another assumption seems to be that all service is created equal and all service is necessarily beneficial.   But that was simply not the case.  At times it was painfully evident--sitting around a project with nothing to do because the coordinators hadn't planned well enough or there were too many of us for the job, thus wasting precious wo/man power (not to mention time).  At other times, the disparity between the quality of service was not seen but felt.  Leaving one service project you might feel bored and apathetic about it all, others you left feeling rejuvenated about the prospect of the service you have put into action. 

I don't mean to sound so cynical about the whole thing.  The whole endeavor of service is absolutely worthwhile, but I at least in the future will be thinking a little more about what this means and the kind of service that I value performing, for whom, and to what end.  Perhaps this makes me even more of a service erudite with nothing better to do than think about how I can best change the world and further reinforces the very notion of "higher/lower" that I seek to dispel.  Yet maybe it will make my future service more meaningful, both to me and the areas I serve, to have some answers to these questions.  Without asking them, we seem to run the risk of alienating the motivation from the action of service, and in this day, with resources running thin, it's something that we just can't afford.