serving … the story

Assumption’s Brittany Wilson, Paul Belsito and Marisa Reis (foreground)
with Tuscaloosa First Presbyterian pastor Charlie Durham and tornado survivor Dana Dowling.

When Katerina Reilly remembers the tomato fields of Immokalee, FL, one of her most vivid memories isn’t about what she did for others in her one week – but what the tomato pickers did month after month.

“It felt really important to see them running to busses in the morning hoping to get work, and to see them at the end covered with gunk,” said Reilly, speaking to a packed auditorium at Assumption College on Wednesday night, Sept. 19. “Each bucket they fill holds 50 pounds of tomatoes, so you can imagine how heavy that is.”

The Assumption student is no stranger to manual labor.

“I feel it’s really important to do something with my hands. Audrey Hepburn said one hand is for yourself and the other is to help others.”

Reilly’s audience was made up of people determined to do the same. She and many other community service veterans were there to share stories about their experiences in Students Exploring New Destinations (SEND). The program, started in 2006, gives Assumption students the opportunity to put in weeks of service in such far-flung places as Ecuador and Baltimore, South Dakota and Florida. Multiple trips are offered in the Northeast, but even those trips get students out of New England: Past places include the poverty-stricken New Jersey cities of Trenton and Camden, as well as the Bronx. (And, of course, more.)

Run by Campus Ministry’s Vinnie Sullivan-Jacques, SEND takes applications each fall and then conducts interviews. The application deadline this year is Oct. 5. Last year 125 students applied for 105 slots. Students raise some money for their trip, but Campus Ministry covers the rest.

Sullivan-Jacques, who himself found a similar trip important when he was an undergraduate, listed three reasons to do SEND.

“One is to put your faith in action,” he said, while stressing that “it doesn’t matter where you are in your faith.” One can still participate and have a meaningful experience serving others.

Sullivan-Jacques also cited the chance to form bonds with new people and to explore places different from what you’re used to.

Yethulsa Fingfing would heartily agree with the latter.

“A lot of people want to go outside the United States to experience another culture and another spiritual world, but they don’t realize you can do that right in your own backyard,” said Fingfing, reflecting on her profound experience last May at Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. “What I learned there was so different from what I learned in third grade about Pilgrims and Indians.”

Yethulsa (left) and fellow Assumption student Justin
learning Lakota words for various body parts.

Having been fortunate enough to accompany Fingfing on that trip, I recall in particular her relentless questions at night discussions and her open disgust at the hypocrisy of our nation’s mistreatment of Native Americans. Yet Wednesday night she was quick to acknowledge the positive energy that radiates despite the sadness and frustration, the inspiration of residents and volunteers.

Turning to her co-presenter, Alyssa Lombardi, Fingfing laughed. “I didn’t even know you last year, and now you’re my homey!”

Katarina found the lighthearted side of that bonding in the Florida trip, apparent even on the trip down. “We were a nutty group and we couldn’t stop laughing,” Katarina said.

Meanwhile, Colleen Putzel found a remarkable friendliness in Ecuador.

“People will tell you their life story and they’ll start crying,” said Putzel, speaking of a community where people make less than $3 a day. “They’re so open in how they talk to you.”

Listening, I was determined not to intrude on the students’ time on stage, but it was hard to resist sharing myself. This year I’ve experienced two SEND trips: One as the official escort to Pine Ridge, the other as host to the group which came to my hometown of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, helping rebuild after the April 27, 2011 tornado that killed 54 people. Had I spoken, I would have shared how they also helped me build something – that being a profound link between my New England present and my Deep South past. I would have shared all the admiration and gratitude the locals expressed to me after the group left – evidence that, despite the transitory in-and-out nature of the experience, they each may have left deeper impressions than they will ever know. I would have shared that those SEND groups gave me two of the most joyous weeks in my 12 years at Assumption College.

But even that wouldn’t have come close to covering the rich range of what my SEND experiences were about – a rhetorical problem faced by every speaker on Wednesday night. “You can never understand what can happen in one week unless you experience it for yourself,” said Will Rein, speaking of his Baltimore experience.

His opening line reflected that reality.

“Oh man,” he said, shaking his head. “These trips …”

Lakota girl breaks in brand new porch with those who built it.

Eustace Conway as pictured on Gilbert’s biography.

Eustace Conway likes to tell the story of how, one winter in the North Carolina mountains, he shot a deer, only to find it still clinging to life. Conway decided to end the deer’s suffering by taking a knife and puncturing its neck – only to have the deer fight its way back to its feet, thrusting its eight-point rack at his attacker. As Conway tells it, man and deer wrestled ferociously until it finally died; covered in its blood, Conway thanked the deer for the sacrifice it had made, so that he might go on living.

“And that is what I call feeling connected to your groceries!” Conway told a crowd of several hundred students on Tuesday, August 28^th, at Assumption College.

Those students shouldn’t have been stunned: They’d read at least parts of The Last American Man, Elizabeth Gilbert’s book about Conway, including a stirring version of the above anecdote. But Conway – long-haired, bearded and tall, talking without notes as he paces back and forth – has a way of making an impression. It doesn’t hurt that this advocate of living close to nature has taken some wild risks to test his survival capabilities, and managed some bizarre exploits along the way, from crossing the country twice via horse – once riding the horse, and once with a buggy – to founding Turtle Island, the patch of North Carolina wilderness where those who are hardy and idealistic enough tackle the humbling challenge of living as Conway does. (Most quit in frustration.)

While Conway acknowledges that he struggles when it comes to making compromises with those who wish to emulate him, he keeps trying because his theme of connection cuts both ways: While Conway derives some of his intense sense of purpose from living as close to nature as possible, he also sees it as his destiny to persuade others to do the same. Hence the public speaking, hence the telephone, hence the television show Mountain Men – in which he appears, even as he ridicules its lack of realism. (The producers wanted to film him peeing uphill, he told Assumption students.)

But while “connection” was a key word for Conway, about halfway through his talk I jotted down two other “c” words – ones I’m not sure he even uttered in the talk. Those words: “Curiosity & Confidence!” I scribbled them down just as it hit me  that Conway was basically unfolding a narrative of American self-education: Even as Emerson valued Thoreau for the latter’s ability to actually build a canoe (rather than just write about one), I admire Conway’s cycle of reading about some wilderness skill and then trying it himself, and then reading more so he could understand the deeper context – and then trying even more.

Eustace Conway is experiential education personified.

Which is why he shows up here, in a blog devoted to stories of service. Sure, there are other good reasons for him to fit here: Conway sees his lifestyle as one that cuts against the “me now” way we treat the environment, as well as an endorsement of kinder social and foreign policies in which we are more respectful of others. But as an advocate of community service learning, it’s his combination of curiosity and confidence I most want students to bring to their service.

The curiosity, of course, to explore how they fit into the broader context of not only nature, but also of community, locally, nationally, and globally. How are the lives of others different from our own? What can we learn and apply from all those differences? What do we have to give? What would we get back in the process of giving it? In what ways might others surprise us?

In what ways might we surprise ourselves?

The second of which brings us to confidence – the belief that in service we might be capable of far more than we ever guessed. I don’t just mean this in terms of noble self-sacrifice, but also in terms of skill sets. The community service narratives I read at the ends of each semester recount dozens of instances in which students felt distrustful of their own abilities, whether they were going to tutor children of immigrants or clear trails, engage ex-convicts or work on a farm. Sometimes those volunteer engagements lead to career choices, based on the affirming of abilities they never knew they had. And, upon learning their new capabilities, they have a few less excuses for not taking their service further.

Of course, sometimes volunteers find out what they’re not suited for – or at least what they’re not ready for yet. Like the many dropouts from Conway’s Turtle Island, they may leave frustrated at how the reality fell short of the idealized vision – just as Conway winds up frustrated at his own inability to relate to the people whom he’s trying to reach. But hopefully even disillusioning volunteer experiences help us chose more wisely in the long run, without renouncing the commitment to serve.

There is something to be said for situations – and for people – who push us out of our comfort zones into a broader awareness. Eustace Conway is one of those people – and I find inspiration in both his successes and his frustrations. I try not to set myself up for quite so much frustration – Gilbert depicts a man whose ambition is unattainable. “People used to say to Eustace, ‘if you touch only one life, you’ve had an effect on the world!’ But Eustace was never satisfied with that. It was his intent to alter the very destiny of humanity …” While that seems spiritually foolish, a surefire setting up of one’s self for failure, it guarantees that he has touched, mostly likely, a thousand such lives over the years.

Gilbert goes on to share the example of a young man named Dave, and how Conway shared with him a message of “mindfulness” in which you should “Revere your senses; don’t degrade them with drugs, with depression, with willful oblivion. Try to notice something new every day. … You can never become a real man if you have a careless and destructive attitude … but maturity will follow mindfulness even as day follows night.”

When that young man tearfully announced that he thought he should leave Turtle Island and go home, he found Conway comforting, offering compassion and advice that he still found valuable 15 years later. “He told me I was free to go home … And I did go home, but when I got there, I found that something had changed in me. And the rest of my life was changed.”