The first day of Service Week was short for my group: we helped with distribution at the River City Food Bank in Sacramento, then headed back to where we were staying in Davis. With time to spare before dinner, we did a little debrief. I suggested we go around in a circle and describe what we had done that day, and talk about any questions that had come up for us.
One student talked about how she had interacted with a client at River City who was about to be evicted, and how she realized that she had enough money in her bank account to pay his rent. She hadn’t offered to pay his rent, and was keenly aware of that decision. Another student, responding to an anecdote about a family with only $4 to spend on dinner for three, noted that she had spent more than $4 on iPhone apps in the past few days.
As we went around the circle, the students wondered together about their responsibility to the people they had met. They mused about structural violence (a concept we'd been discussing in Peace Studies), nutrition, and food access. We ended on a thoughtful note and the group broke to prepare dinner.
As the kids scattered, the other adult in the group turned to me and asked about benchmarks: did I have particular answers in mind for them to the questions they were asking? I think she felt like we'd left with some big ones hanging. Her question got me thinking.
I've been facilitating service experiences for young people long enough to know that this contemplation of privilege and wealth can be an important and early stage of the process, and that there aren't many easy answers. My own relationship to service learning is nuanced enough that I know I want my students to get a little uncomfortable, but not so uncomfortable that they shut down. My agenda is partly that they come to a place of human solidarity, of activism and service in conversation.
It's true that sometimes I go into teaching, into the classroom or into the field, with an idea of the topics I want my students to grasp that day. I’ll make copious notes on structural violence, or Walter Wink, or nonviolent resistance, and be sure we hit all the key points before our time that day is over.
But sometimes the benchmark is a question.
And for service trips, the kids hit it on the first day: What is my responsibility to the people around me, people I do not know and may have no immediate connection to? What is my responsibility when I have too much, and others don't have enough? Why do economic, governmental, and educational systems privilege some people but not others?
I don't have easy answers for them. The hard answer is that they are implicated - in everything. And the truth is that they will spend their lives asking questions, doing service, being human, and trying to make sense of the world.
And it will mean so much more when they come to the answer, whatever it is, on their own. That they start asking those questions under my care is success enough for me.
