Selfish Service

Do a good turn every day. That's what they teach you in Boy Scouts. But have you ever met someone that is so determined to follow the creed that they literally make a check box for it on their daily to do list? This might be the same guy that is about to get in bed when they realize they haven't done their good deed yet, so they come and knock on your door at 11:30 (you still had your lights on) asking if they can take your trash out. They look so desperate you let them have it, even though your roommate just took it out a few hours ago. Is that really service? Who's need is being met here? Yours? Or his?

I don't think service is service unless you're really meeting a need. Which also means that for me, service can be something as small as taking ten minutes to listen to someone tell you about their day or the biggest news in their life that they're just so excited about. When you truly serve someone, you get the warm fuzzies and you find that your life suddenly goes better than usual. But I think that sometimes, people looking for that feeling or to gratify one of their own needs to feel valuable and memorable look for things they can do to check their own boxes, disregarding what is truly best for the people they are around. I think that is the problem with a lot of international interventions. You get people that want to "make a difference" so they look around until they find something they think constitutes a problem, and then they decide they are going to fix it. They don't take time to ask if the people they are "serving" also view the issue as a problem, nor do they bother to find out how they would go about solving it. Usually the people closest to the problem are the ones with the best answers, even if they don't have the resources to carry them out. Heading in to a situation assuming that you obviously must have all of the answers because you obviously don't have the problem is arrogance and it is disrespectful. And it's not service. This is called scratching your own back with someone else's thorn. This is taking advantage of people.

My greatest fear about my field study is that I will get to South Africa and find out the nutrition and AIDS really isn't a problem. I don't think that will happen, but if it does, that's ok. I figure that instead of throwing myself a pity party because things didn't work, out, I'll just turn around and ask, so what things are a problem for you? If that happens, my project won't turn out the way I expect, but hopefully I'll at least learn something useful from the people that know best.