In my life, I’ve been blessed to have a few eye-opening experiences. I discovered having one of those on December 20, 2016 during my service learning assignment. In my introduction to sustainability, design, and the built environment class at Onondaga Community College, I was given an opportunity to apply what I had learned in the classroom to the everyday environment. I volunteered at Habitat for Humanity, which is in the downtown part of Syracuse on the west side. This was an unfamiliar area to me. Being blinded by your own perspective and not being exposed to something that makes you feel uncomfortable, can really impair your ability to be accepting of what is different around you in the world.
I arrived on site at Habitat for Humanity at 12:49 p.m. Upon my arrival, I walked into the building looking for someone to notice me by asking what I was doing there or if they could help me. Surprisingly, I was not greeted in any way, shape, or form. I did not know the setup of the inside of the building. I noticed there was a desk with a front and back counter top as two people stood behind it, one middle aged male and one older female, who looked to be the ones in charge. I then decided to walk to the other side of the countertop, so they might finally notice me. I saw a young man who looked to be the same age as me, so I assumed he was there to volunteer as well for an assignment. I figured I was in the right location to wait until one of the two people behind the desk said something to me. I waited for five minutes, the male just stared at me and didn’t smile or say anything. Feeling a sigh of relief my classmate, Jon, walked into the building and spoke up immediately to them. The female who looked to be in charge then told us to put our things insecurely behind the desk and sign a sheet of paper with our names and the time we arrived. The young man whom I saw standing there in front of the counter was also a volunteer like I had thought; however, he was not doing a class assignment. He merely was there to help others by giving his time and to be honest… that shocked me. Once we all had signed the sheet, she scolded us because we all wrote the time we were working until. We were not supposed to write the time we finished until our shifts were over. The young male who was volunteering with Jon and I asked the women what she would like us to start doing. She then directed us to the back of the warehouse and told us to sort through shipment to find boxes of nails. She wanted us to restock them on the shelves in the store. That only took us 20 minutes to complete because there were not many in the shipment. After this brief assignment was complete, 12:45 p.m. rolled around the clock and there wasn’t anything to do for a while. We all stood around the back warehouse throwing away trash and conversed with one another. This served as a great learning experience in its own way because we all learned more about each other, which helped to build a strong bond of teamwork. Continuously we each asked management if there was anything we could do but they just kept brushing us off, so we became desperate trying to find things to do.
Suddenly, we were all hit with assignments out of nowhere like they had just realized we were walking in for the first time. They were finally paying attention to us and assigning us tasks to complete. The first job I was given was to clean the French doors to the display case. In this picture, you can see the door I cleaned around each window grid from the inside of the glass to the exterior. I worked thoroughly cleaning those double doors for about 45 minutes.
Immediately afterwards I was instructed to put a fan together to be hung on display. I was accustomed to helping around the house, but this was confusing for me because there were parts inside the box that didn’t belong with this fan. I first screwed on the fan blades, which was the easy part. Next, I needed some help, so I called Jon over to help me continue the rest. We collaborated our efforts and finished the fan within a half hour.
After I completed assembling the fan, my final assignment was given to me. I walked over to the male who was directing us and he told me to sweep the back room. These two pictures below show the environment where my task was to sweep the floor. You can see that the back room was not a very pleasant area. It was cold, messy, and dusty. Being alone working in this kind of environment was not very fun. As I swept, I pondered the list of assignments I was given to do. I thought to myself, the tasks I was given today were tedious and unimportant, but they made a huge difference and sometimes that is all that matters.
As I was driving to my service learning assignment, I was anticipating a long 4 hours of annoying work. To be honest, I wanted the time to go by quickly, so I could write this paper and be done with it. When I was first introduced to this assignment I thought “Oh my goodness, this is a lot of work and time that I don’t have to be doing something that requires using personal time to complete.” As I drove up to Habitat for Humanity, I felt very sick to my stomach because I realized that my GPS had led me to a place I felt very uncomfortable. I saw the building and the surrounding location. Scary-looking people were standing outside the building just angrily staring at me. A rush of frightened emotions came over me. I didn’t want to get out of the car to do this project. I sure wasn’t in Kansas anymore! Being raised in Cicero, N.Y. in the quiet, comfortable suburbs, I immediately passed judgments about the people, the building, location, and the future experience I was about to have. Although I felt extremely out of my comfort zone, I tried to be positive. An assignment… that is exactly how I viewed what I was about to do. I felt very lost the second I got out of my new 2016 Toyota Rav4. The other vehicles around me looked run down, beat up, and not taken care of the way I babied mine. There were two doors in front of me, about 5 feet apart from one another and I didn’t know the correct one to enter. I didn’t like feeling “new,” like I didn’t know where I was going or what I was going to be doing. This experience was making me feel completely vulnerable. When I walked in, no one acknowledged me. When I walked up towards the desk, two workers started at me, one trying to ring someone out (which I understood couldn’t talk to me right away) but the other male worker just stood there, looked at me, and ignored me. Personally, at this point I felt that immediately this environment was very unprofessional because no one was even acknowledging my presence. Even if they assumed I was a customer, it was no way to treat a guest in their store. Horrible customer service. I worked 7 years in customer service before deciding to return back to college. Even I knew that wasn’t right and the situation made me feel very uncomfortable. As the day continued, I was feeling very bored and tired because all we were doing was standing around desperately looking for things to do. I just wanted to go home. When I was put in the back room by myself to sweep the cold floor, I just wanted to walk right out of the place. I’m a very hard worker and I don’t mind doing physical labor, however the way in which I was talked to and treated was wrong and it made me feel like I was a slave. The two people in charge that day are probably always used to bossing everybody around so naturally I was the victim. The last hour was what I call the magical hour. I encountered seeing things that made me feel differently about the last three hours of being there. One of those experiences was a lady who tried to bargain a lower price because she only had $40 to spend. The lady had diabetes and she had said her insulin was low and needed to use the rest of her paycheck to buy herself more medicine. I have seen people before in my life who are less fortunate, but this scenario was different. This situation touched my heart in a way I can’t describe. At first I was mad the lady was so persistent and kept nagging the poor women in charge, but within a matter of minutes the more I listened the more my heart ached for this lady who was so desperate that she needed tiles badly. Tiles… of all things, I complain about the littlest things compared to when you see someone become so desperate to have to beg for a lower cost on tiles inside of a store that already has lower prices. Just that experience alone that day changed my whole outlook on the last 4 hours I had encountered for this service learning. I had to stretch my comfort zone to see what I was meant to see that day. I am usually an outgoing person when I am in my comfort zone, but that day I was not; I was very quiet. I noticed once I became open to a new perspective, the experience showed me what I was missing. I wasn’t seeing clearly. I wondered why I needed to be assigned such a ridiculous project. Once I left, I realized what my professor was trying to say. It wasn’t about the dirty or harsh conditions I was working in, or the way I was being treated. This wasn’t about me.
Taking knowledge learned in the classroom and applying it in our community, creates a connection for students so it’s evident that what we are learning in the classroom, must be applied in the future outside of school to our own lives someday. As students, we are preparing for our futures in the “real” world and the main reason why we are students is because we are not ready to go out there yet. Service learning allows us to reach outside of the classroom and practice the skills that we have been learning to become professionals. This helps us train our minds and hearts to be ready for all the things that life will throw at us. It teaches us not to be selfish and to be humble to others that we will be working with one day. We have had the opportunities in this class to see things that are real, that are going on outside in the world that can be applied to what we have learned so far. The I-81 challenge debate made us think of solutions for something that is going on currently in our lives. When we went as a class to the Center of Excellence for Environmental and Energy Systems, we were all applying concepts learned in class and being able to see how it relates to a popular well-known building locally in Syracuse. By preparing for the future we can use all the knowledge that is being given to us by our teachers and apply them to our everyday environment. Service learning allows us to do just that, to apply what we’ve learned and then to analyze what we’ve learned in the process.
From all the lessons I’ve learned in life thus far, the one repeatedly seen time and time again is, be grateful for what you have. This service learning project at Habitat for Humanity has helped remind me that you really can’t and shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. You never know the positive outcomes that could humble you and make you become a better person to help someone in your life. Life isn’t always about me, it is about helping others succeed in life too. We are all equal. We can all can be teachers, we all should try our best every day to achieve that goal.
SIMPLELANE.LIFE 