The Service Trip: Round 4

In my short two and a half years at William and Mary, I’ve been lucky enough to participate in a huge array of service ventures at and through the College.

Coming in as a freshman Sharpe Scholar at the College, I worked through my community health seminar with Sentara Hospice of Williamsburg in a capacity that was initially outside of my comfort zone but I later came to enjoy and appreciate as a service to our community. My experiences with Sharpe inspired me and provided the impetus for my subsequent involvement with a number of projects and opportunities provided through the College’s Office of Community Engagement and Scholarship (OCES).

I decided my freshman year that I would like to always participate in different kinds of service, and this Spring Break, for 7 days, I am being given the opportunity to continue to realize that aspiration.

Spring Break my freshman year involved a trip to Somoto, Nicaragua to work with Global Village Project and the Nicaraguan branch of Habitat for Humanity. We built houses from the ground up for people who otherwise would not be able to afford them and worked alongside the families who would later live in those houses.

That summer, I traveled to Birlad, Romania for a month and worked in the Failure to Thrive Clinic of a rural orphanage and hospital. My charge was a 2-year-old boy named Dimitri and for a month I was essentially the primary role model and care-giver for an incredibly impressionable and gifted young child. The experience, just like that in Nicaragua, changed my life and opened my eyes up to yet another inequality plaguing our planet.

Last winter, through my opportunity living the Community Scholars House – an extension of the Sharpe Scholars program – I was able to coordinate and lead a trip to La Ceiba, Honduras, wbere myself and three others worked with the Honduran Red Cross and local non-profits dealing with HIV/AIDS peer education and infrastructure. Our work brought us in touch with a public health system that had crumbled and forced us to grapple with societal norms and factors that were contributing to the rampant spread of the disease across the country. We were blessed with the ability to work alongside our Honduran peers in efforts to reach out to people across the countryside and lead seminars in Spanish on how to prevent the spread of the virus.

Last week, to celebrate the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King on his birthday, I participated for my second year in the College’s MLK “Day-On of Service” hosted by SPICE – the Students’ Petersburg Initiative for Community Engagement – and we worked to demolish and rebuild a shed to make it up to code, as well as install railings for a wonderful elderly woman named Dorris who had lived in the same house for the past 80 years.

This morning I learned that I would be spending my upcoming Spring Break, March 6-13th 2010, in Gaston, North Carolina on a Teach for America sponsored domestic venture through OCES dealing with educational inequality. Myself and the team of 10 students will work to help teach classes, grade assignments, participate in and plan extracurricular activities for students, and engage with students during their free periods. This trip is especially meaningful to me because I spent a lot of my childhood growing up on Lake Gaston, North Carolina in the exact same community that I will be working in. The opportunity to give back to a community that has given me so much I anticipate being incredibly rewarding.

As I write this I am also struck by another reason that this trip will be so meaningful to me – just how lucky I am to have had the stellar public education that I did and continue to have. I think that having students reach out to their fellow students – despite differences in age – sends an incredibly powerful message.

I am thankful for the tools and means by which William and Mary has allowed me to substantively and diversely grapple with many of the issues that plague our world and nation. The recent disaster in Haiti reminds us that from Nicaragua, to Romania, to Honduras, to Petersburg, to North Carolina, to Williamsburg itself – everywhere deserves all the attention and help that we can give it. Many of us are blessed enough to lead comfortable lives absent of many of the day-to-day cares and trials that so many of our fellow people are forced to grapple with.

I believe that by the time I am done at William and Mary, the people I have encountered along the way – through these opportunities to serve – will have taught me far more than I can ever have possibly taught them.

Live to Serve, Love to Serve,

Go Tribe–

Brian