Crossing Boundaries

Last week I attended the service meeting for those who were interested in doing service at The Tunbridge Public Charter School. The meeting was mainly information based, we spoke about how we were feeling and one of the main points that stuck with me and I pulled out of the readings was the point about being different. Whether you are different because of your race, where you grew up, or your gender; the list can go on forever. The woman speaking to us Manal Arma the student intern for service leaving said one word that stuck with me, pity. She spoke about how we should not pity them for any reason that they do not want our pity.  

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper the two main characters are the narrator and the narrator's husband John. From the story, we can guess that the narrator is going mentally insane. Her husband John who is a doctor wants to fix her and make her better so their family can be together once again. Gilman’s short story made me think of the emotions we feel for the people around us. We don’t need to know them let alone love them for us to pity them. John pitties his wife for the pain that she is going through even though he cannot understand what she is feeling. He wants to fix her to make her better and normal, he misses who she use to be.

William Wordsworth’s I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud is telling us the story of a memory from his past. The memory is something that narrator misses and when is not feeling the best will think about it to cheer them up. This is a memory that brought great joy to the narrator. Relating this idea of holding onto the things in life which make you happy is an idea that could relate to service learning. You will be happier if you remember the moments in life that made you happy when times are sad.

The last reading I did was Hawthorne’s The Birthmark. The story had a similar theme to Gilman's short story about two people and one of them trying to fix the other. The man in the story like John in The Yellow Wallpaper wants to fix the woman because he pities her. In service learning, we sometimes feel like we can fix the people around us. Because of the privileges around us we sometimes feel like we have the answer that can fix other people. I had an experience between my junior and senior year taking a service trip to Tanzania. The children we met had so much less than all of us, the idea of only getting a new shirt because we no longer fit into the two we own is an idea that is very different to most Americans. This idea of changing what they have always had can be detrimental.

This idea of fixing people because of the pity and possibly even the guilt we feel for being so blessed has a lot to do with service. People do service to feel better about one’s self and many people will disagree with that statement. I do believe that helping someone with no intentions of getting anything in return besides that feeling you will have after a day of helping someone is the reason people participate in service.