Service Is...

Service is leaving things better than you found them. It is getting a towel and wiping down the table at Santai after you eat. It is asking your friends if you could clear the table for them or hold the door open for the person that does. It is picking up trash that isn’t yours and learning the names of the people who serve your food and clean our classrooms. It is a smile and a good morning or afternoon.

Service is turning love into action. It is the awareness that other people exist and have needs, just like you and then taking an interest in their lives. It is the ability to empathize and put another person’s need in front of your own. It is saying thank you and please and reminding the people you love or admire that you love and admire them. It is walking in another person’s shoes and wondering how that might feel.

Service is sacrifice without attention or applause. It is working behind the scenes and putting in the hours, the months, the years. It is attending the meetings at lunch while your friends are resting. It is taking five years to see your goals start to blossom. It is your ability to invest parts of yourself that you weren’t sure you had. It is commitment and consistency. It is trial and error and being open-minded.

Service is traveling and talking to the locals. Ignoring the tours and getting to know people. Sitting on the ground and playing with children, asking questions, dancing awkwardly, eating new food,learning to look foolish and laughing it off. It is seeing all cultures as valid and important. It is valuing diversity and promoting understanding. It is celebrating embarrassment and finding joy in the absurd.

Service is internalizing injustice and finding ways to pick yourself up and fight. It is about speaking out at every opportunity against racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia. It is about equality and fairness. All over the world, but also in your classroom, in our hallways, in your heart.

Service is making mistakes and learning from them. It is taking responsibility for your actions and teaching your peers. It is being a kind leader and a useful team player. It is not about being perfect like a saint, but about taking small steps, each day toward bigger goals. It is about being true to yourself, even as you are constantly changing. It is about laying the foundations of who you are and who you are becoming. It is about finding the heros and deepening your values.

Service is ignoring the voices that say you are lame. Ignoring the people who pride themselves on cheating the system. It is finding ways to make your world, in even the tiniest ways, better. Not using straws, watching the packaging in what you eat, checking the label for Palm Oil, because you love turtles and orangutans. The oceans and the forests. It is reading the news and following current events. It is about boycotts and protests.

Service is getting to know people who are different than you, and not just from Kenya or Cambodia, but in your grade level, in your class. It is taking risks and building confidence. It is worrying about peace and justice more than popularity and being liked. It is taking a stand when someone needs it most. Defending the underdog, even when you are the underdog, knowing full well there is a dog further under than you.

Service is tending to the cynical voices in your head and fanning the flames of your ideals. It is realizing that, “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better.” It is singing that the, “Times are a changing’” and finding causes to stand for and ideas to champion. It is reading the news and finding allies. It is about making connections and building teams.

Service is political and personal. Global and local. It is saying that the world and its future and everything in it, matter enough to you right now to learn more about it, care more about it, do something about it. It is clean water and healthy food. It is understanding the causes and impacts of poverty, crime, violence and working toward solutions.

Service is uncomfortable and awkward. It is sometimes boring and painful. It is getting your hands dirty with soil and watching a seed grow. It is sitting next to an elderly Chinese woman while she stares into the distance, you might feel vulnerable and small, and this is service too. It is giving a younger kid a high five, or a teacher a compliment when they teach you well.

Service is being open and honest and truthful with yourself. It is confronting your own bias and prejudices. It is overcoming pity and shame, and the need to fix the world through blind charity, but instead investing your blood, sweat and tears into the lives of other people. People you might not know from across continents, or maybe your neighborhood, mother or father.

Service is derailing the status quo and business as usual. It is the opposite of the grind and bureaucracy. It is finding your strength and passion and skill-set and finding ways to connect to other people. It is widening the circle of your influence and being open to influences on you. It is about listening to other people.

Service is not something you have to do.
Service is who you are.

Coming Home

Four years ago while an Ebola scare blanketed western Africa, I was in the process of trying to get a student trip to Kenya. The Daraja Global Concern group at my school was in its second year, and I was eager to find a way to take as many kids from Singapore to Kenya as I could. I knew that Paris was closer to Western Africa than Kenya was to the disease, but parents didn’t seem to understand this geography. Additionally, the high cost of the trip, the fact that it was the first time it had ever been offered, and because the GC itself was little known, made recruiting very difficult. In the end, after weeks of stress, ups and downs many conversations with kids and parents, the trip was on the verge of being cancelled. We just didn’t have the numbers to make it viable.

We needed a miracle.

We were lucky to get four. Their names are Paula, Shruti, Georgina and Jenn. These four amazing women, educators and friends, decided to take a chance and pay their own way to go. We took five kids, a mom and five teachers. And just like that the trip was launched.

And earlier tonight, I finished packing for our fourth trip. Since that first trip, every year the numbers have increased. We have taken the entire Psillides family, more parents and more kids. This year we are maxed out at nineteen participants, including a teacher, and a mom and two kids from Dover. We are able to afford to take three official teachers, Martin and Sarah, and I am super excited to be taking four G7 kids from my cohort. I cannot wait to see their growth on this trip.

I have written at length about this campus and the magic of the Kenyan landscape. I have waxed poetic about the power of meeting these girls. But honestly, the best part for me is watching the young people from UWC South East Asia realise that everything they ever thought about Africa is false. I love watching them take in the pace and smells and interactions with the people on the Daraja Academy campus. I love watching our kids run from the geese and milk the cows. Plant the cabbage and sort the beans.

And to be perfectly honest and selfish, I love returning to my room, the one I have stayed in on every trip, dating back to the first time I went with Kaia years ago. I love watch the red dust gather between my toes and watching the stars drape the sky every night on my way to bed. I love the porridge and the beans and the ice cold Stoney when the weather's hot. I love catching up with Ruth and Chris and Stephen and Charles. I love sitting on the Jason’s porch and reminiscing and future planning. Basking in the notion that we did it. We arrived. This is the world we imagined when we were young and stupid and full of mistakes. We knew even as teenagers that we were meant for this world that we have created.

In closing, I was scrolling through Twitter tonight, slowly becoming enraged by military parades and sexual assault and racism, and like most nights I was feeling helpless and ineffectual, but then I remembered that in a short time I would be in Kenya, with students from a school dedicate to peace.

I remembered that the weapons I have chosen to fight the forces of greed and ignorance and injustice are at Daraja. What better force that these young women to create a world that is the opposite of everything I hate about the current forces in power in the US and beyond?

The work we do, however, small and seemingly disconnected, the work of connecting people from different classes and genders and races, is the work that will bring down the forces of hatred. The love we plant and foster and share through committed, authentic and sustainable relationships with communities that mirror our values, is what will save us all.

There is no need to feel helpless. We cannot change the entire world on our own, but we can dedicate our time, energy and money to small communities around the world. This friendship building will teach us everything we need to know to fight the forces of greed and oppression.

Find your people and spend your life committed to hearing their voices and doing your part.

See you soon Daraja. I’ve missed you.

The Stress Fades

Taking care of and making sure that other people are having a good time and feeling comfortable on a service trip is hard stressful work. Those of us who have travelled quite a bit and know what to expect take things for granted. For example when you show up at your Safari camp and it is in a desolate and inhospitable Samburu landscape, and your camp is a walled concrete “hotel” surrounded by barbed wire and a gravel garden filled with nails, you figure this is par for the course, but when you see the look of sheer terror on the face of the twelve year old Japanese girl you are in charge of and you watch her almost pass-out from heat exhaustion after she listened to the blood drinking practices of the local tribe, you begin to wonder what is going on in her young sheltered mind.

You give her some water and place her in the shade and hope for the best. Eventually, the sun sets and her stomach is filled with food and water and you get into the van and make your way onto the Kenyan savannah and you see an ostrich and an elephant and a crocodile and the clouds become bleached by the setting sun and the golden fields of dry grass swish to the rhythm of the wind and a speckled Falcom alights on a tall Acacia tree, and you know that everything will all be alright.

The stress fades and you realise that you might be responsible for creating memories that will last a life time. You might be planting the seeds that someday may bloom into love for a place and a continent that so many people fear, and because of this fear, detest. You realise that even the most sheltered and protected kids need a dose of distress and discomfort to really understand the state of the world. That maybe seeing seventy-five tiny, dirty primary school kids shovel rice and beans in their mouths as they sit in a tiny bit of shade on a barren sand lot, is just what our privileged kids need to see to understand what we mean when we say that their position of power matters to how they interact with a world outside of their comfort zone.

Maybe they need to hear stories about how young Samburu women must flee their families and villages just to be free from rape and female genital mutilation and childhood marriage. Maybe they need to see that these women, young and old, have had enough and have found a way to fend for themselves, so that when we talk about service in the confines of our beautiful classrooms, we might all do well to remember the shear difficulty so many others deal with in the face of their everyday existence.

Maybe some part of their hearts and minds will be awakened as they drive by houses made of garbage and cow-dung, as they see hundreds of small barefooted children run up to the car smiling and hungry, begging for a wave, some money, an acknowledgement that they exist.

Maybe as they sleep that night in a room that earlier felt gross and uncomfortable, they will realise that it is actually clean, well-lit and safe. That in their bathroom there is running water and that they have access to wifi to check-in on their beautiful lives back home.

Taking care of and making sure that other people are having a good time and feeling comfortable on a service trip is hard stressful work, but at the end of the trip we all go back home and return to our lives- thankful that our week of roughing it is now over. We do not have to eat the porridge anymore or feel guilty at bearing witness to what at the time felt so unbearable.

It’s impossible to foster empathy in people to situations that they have never felt on a visceral level. So we drench our kids in experiences that might make them ill at ease. We force them to push themselves at a young age and look reality in the eye, in the hopes that with their eyes wide open, they will not be able to look away for much longer.

…

The mountains in the distance fade into gentle shades of purple and grey, the clouds white and smeared across the sky. Their is silence and distance from the world. An Ornyx grazes quietly, swishing its tail, a bush is alive with butterflies. I’m standing up, arms crossed and face out of the pop-top safari van. Wind blown hair. Arms sun drenched. Bouncing on the red dirt road. You are alive and you are aware enough to know it. You are alive and you are aware enough to know it. You are alive and you are aware enough to know it.

I’m slightly embarrassed by my smile, but I cannot hide. Eyes closed, it’s all I can hear over he sound of the engine: You are alive and you are aware enough to know it.