Overcoming Boundaries

Service has always played a major role in my life. Ever since I was little, my parents took to me homeless shelters over the holidays, helped organize community canned food drives, and started organizations that promoted service opportunities in our town. Growing up with all these opportunities as a kid encouraged me to take this foundation and love of service to a new level and make it my own. So, during my freshman year of high school, I became a teen advisor for a nonprofit organization called Girl Up, which strived to help girls in developing countries gain access to their basic rights. Girl Up addressed issues such as child marriage and the right to be counted at birth. As a true feminist, I began this opportunity with no worries or doubts- how hard could it be? As I started traveling to different countries across the world, I realized that connecting with these teenage girls was not as easy as I imagined it to be. We had different thoughts, beliefs, upbringings, and most importantly, culture and language. These barriers between us made it more difficult to connect with them and fight for their rights. However, I had to learn to push through these challenges in order to reach my goal of achieving equal rights for girls everywhere. As I pushed myself to climb out of my comfort zone, I realized that I could connect with these girls better and started to find similarities between us and I even learned to appreciate them more. Most importantly, I learned that these barriers such as language, race, and beliefs only bring cultures and societies closer together once they are looked past and accepted.

            In the poem “Mending Wall,” Robert Frost discusses the role of boundaries as two people, the speaker and the neighbor, argue over a wall. The speaker, on one hand, wants to take down the wall because he sees no need for it, since the only thing in his hard is trees and grass. However, the speaker’s neighbor argues that “Good fences make good neighbors,” (27) thus isolating himself from any of his neighbors and friends. The speaker argues that “something there is that doesn’t love a wall” (1). This “wall” that the speaker and the neighbor argue over represents more than just a wall itself in the poem. Frost insinuates that barriers and differing beliefs have the ability to create separation between different kinds of people. I can relate to this because in my service, I experienced many “walls” between the girls in developing countries that at first intimidated me. It felt easier to let our culture and upbringing differences to define our relationship, so at first I let the wall come between us. However, I started to realize that breaking down our differences only helped us come closer, and in this way we started to have more in common than I ever thought.

Similarly, the poem “Accident, Mass. Ave.” by Jill McDonough discusses separation between two types of people and how making assumptions about people can only create additional barriers. In the poem, when the author gets rear ended by a foreign woman, she automatically makes assumptions about her: “I got out of the car yelling, swearing at this woman, a little woman, whose first language was not English” (8-9). As soon as the author saw this woman, she judges her based on her appearance and suggests that she thought of herself as better than the foreign woman. However, as the author begins to yell at the woman, she realizes the woman starts to cry and even knows that she is in the wrong. When she realizes the woman is weak and vulnerable, the author “puts her arms around her” and “held her”  (36). In this moment, the author forgets about their differences over their languages and the fight over the crash. These two women come together and embrace their challenges. This struck me as particularly powerful because I, too, judged the girls in developing countries the same way and in the beginning, I thought of myself as better than them because I am more privileged. However, once I began to see that they were just as vulnerable as I was, our differences no longer mattered.

In the last poem “Learning to Read” by Frances E. W. Harper, the author traces her experiencing of learning to read and how it changes his life. In the beginning, she struggles to “put the words together” (11), but soon she begins to learn to read the bible and by the end she comes so far with her education that she “got a little cabin” (45) and begins to feel “independent” (47). This poem struck me because it proves how impactful an education can serve people. The simple act of reading can improve a person’s way of life, status, and sense of independence. The poems and themes discussed by Frost and McDonough put this poem into perspective for me. Through my service, as I overcame the barriers and “walls” that I encountered in foreign countries, I helped girls all over the world gain rights that I hoped would help them find independence and confidence as did Frances E. W. Harper. Through connecting with hundreds of unique, but equally beautiful girls, I helped them gain rights and educational opportunities that would benefit them forever.