“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.” Mahatma Gandhi
We’ll come back to that quote at the end, but I ought to begin with what I’ve been up to since my last post! I have spent the last several weeks engulfed in the work I am doing for the Coachella Valley Housing Coalition. It has been an absolute pleasure to become a productive member of the team at CVHC and I am really enjoying the work I have been able to do for their community services department.
The majority of the work I have done thus far has been concentrated on the services offered to residents of CVHC’s 32 multi-family complexes. Through various grants, contracts and partnerships, CVHC is able to provide summer camps for children living in many of these communities. My efforts have been focused on the behind the scenes work that is required to keep these programs running smoothly and to ensure we have useful records and data when it comes time to demonstrate the impact of the grant funding we receive to run these programs. In addition to the summer camps, kids living in these complexes also are able to attend after school programs during the academic year and their parents can take advantage of computer and financial literacy courses as well.
A few of our camp participants at Indian Wells Tennis Garden
I have been lucky enough to play a more active role in the tennis camp that CVHC offers through the Indian Wells Tennis Garden. For three and a half weeks, we bus 30-50 kids over to the facility every Tuesday and Thursday for lessons from the pros. This program not only gets our participants outside and active but it also exposes a population of kids living in the affordable housing facilities to a sport that has traditionally been dominated by a more affluent community. I have been able to help run drills and I can even jump in on some of the games to challenge the more advanced players. Several of the older kids have been coming to this camp for many years so their skills have improved dramatically.
I have also been able to step outside the office to conduct a survey among residents living in three of our complexes in Coachella. These surveys contain questions about the community, the schools and their safety. Going door-to-door two nights a week and being invited into the homes of resident’s eager to share their experience has been very rewarding. It is one thing to be a volunteer with CVHC, it is another to sit down and listen to the story of those individuals who call a CVHC property home. I have also had the opportunity to sit down with the kids who attend our summer camps and talk to them about their experience with the program. Both these projects are ongoing so I hope to have more to report in my next post!
This first full month of my experience has flown by and I really do believe it is because I am starting to lose myself in the service I am doing. Reflection has always been stressed as an important part of service and so if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to reflect a little bit on this experience and explain why I decided to begin this post with a quote. For as long as I can remember, I have traveled along a well-defined path in life. While I was always open to making unexpected stops along the way, I never doubted that the major landmarks and final destination would always be the same. I was going to graduate from high school and college, earn a master’s degree in teaching and then find a district I loved, a job that paid the bills and a classroom filled with eager young minds with whom I could share my passion for American history. I took a tremendous amount of pride in the fact that I always had an exact answer to any questions about my future and my plan became one of the pillars of my identity. Over the past three years at Stonehill, just about every other pillar of my identity has been morphed or molded into something I could have never expected. And having spent just over six weeks here in the valley, I can already feel that final pillar beginning to crumble. I was warned by numerous people that this project would change my life; needless to say, they were right.
Don’t worry, work hasn’t kept me from exploring my surroundings! Here is a view looking back into the valley from the mountains along highway 371.
I began with those famous words by Mahatma Gandhi because they provide a great deal of comfort for someone who, by his own admission, is scared out of his mind to enter the unknown without plan in hand for what the future will hold. And while there is a great deal of fear and anxiety associated with this notion of ‘losing ourselves’, I have also found a sense of liberation and excitement for the future that even the most well-intentioned plan could not provide. It would be misleading to say that because of a month and a half of service I’m now perfectly fine with throwing my future plans out the window. However, I will concede that my service experience thus far has given me the confidence to take that first step off of my safe and familiar path into the dark but intriguing unknown.
While none of this is happening within the confines of Stonehill’s campus, I believe that taking on this challenge of finding ourselves is one of the few ways that we can truly make our college experience worthwhile. It is an almost entirely selfish endeavor by definition but in my mind, this should only emphasize the importance of tackling these questions through service to others. This process will require honesty and sacrifice, there will be laughter and tears and we will enjoy moments of triumph while suffering numerous bouts with frustration. But for those of us with the incredible privilege of dedicating four years of our life to the exploration of our passion at an institution of higher education, I can think of no better time or place to endure this process of self-discovery. Gandhi made it sound easy; for me, it has been one of the hardest things I’ve had to do but the one thing I’m sure of is that it will be worth it in the end. So for now, I’ll do my best to keep losing myself in my work at CVHC and hopefully, by the end of this journey I’ll once again have at least some idea of where my future will lead.
