Define Service

From this ongoing experience and involvements in other service opportunities such as volunteering in my community has shown me that service comes in different forms, yet what motivates me to serve has remained the same. Motivation to serve comes from the impact that you leave when your service is over. For example, during my time as a sex-educator part of my job included teaching various workshops on sexual reproductive health to young adults. Passing on valuable knowledge on how to protect against STD’s and the effects of contracting such diseases was a memorable experience for both them and me. Watching the kids learn about topics they never discussed before and engage in meaningful conversations about the importance of sex education and the use of protection was proof of the effects of your service can have. However, not all effects of service are immediate. This is the case while conducting my research.

            While working for an international non-governmental organization such as Action Aid Zambia, service has a took on a whole new meaning. Action Aid is a foundation strictly based on strengthening human rights especially for vulnerable populations within the community and throughout the country. To be working with people who have dedicated their lives to serve and support has been a great experience and motivation to me while completing my research topic on climate change. Knowing the work, I am doing will directly be used to educate multiple groups of people and be used as a lobbying platform to bring light to an issue that is greatly underrepresented in government and legislation is a very inspiring. Even though the effects of the research we have conducted will not be immediately implemented, knowing the impact it can have and eventually will have is great to be a part of.

            Yet as this research opportunity allows me to do a service for this organization, it has also allowed me to learn and grow as well. Therefore, service is not only being able to help others in any capacity that you can but also allowing others to help you. This was exhibited on my Peace Corps trip last weekend. The opportunity to shadow our Peace Corps volunteer Sunni was an amazing experience. The work she does in the community from advocating for HIV education, implementation of youth support groups with HIV/AIDS and organizing sleep away camps for the youth is an awesome example of service. However, as she helps change her community through her service, Sunni attested to how her service was also changing her. While engaging in new health projects, in a new community of people she has learned new things about herself and volunteering has been an eye-opening experiencing for her. She began to change the way she values things especially the way Zambians value relationships more than materialistic possessions.

            All in all, service isn’t always easy but witnessing the effects of your service is always worth it. To engage in service not only benefit others but it changes you. It helps you grow, learn and it’s a great feeling to know your help making a difference.

In country blog post 2: What is service?

I feel like there are many ways to answer this question but I think service can best be described as devoting oneself to something. During our orientation week, I found out that this year was the first year that any group of students would be working with our organization, Action Aid. Not only that but my research partner, Lizetta, and I are supposed to write a paper that four different organizations. Additionally, none of the organizations we work with specialize in climate change so it often feels like we are starting from scratch while writing our research paper. We’ve been working with my organization for about four weeks now and although it feels like I’ve accomplished a lot, I still have so much left to do.

Although there is a lot of pressure surrounding our topic, I do feel like we are doing a great amount of for ActionAid. Our organization focuses on social justice and being a voice for people who are often neglected by government. The goal of our paper is to provide our organization with enough evidence concerning climate change and climate justice in order for them to push government actions. This is so significant for our research because any information we find could be the first step for monumental changes in Zambia. By serving ActionAid as one of the people leading the charge for their involvement in climate justice, I feel morally obligated to do my best for the organization. I feel as if the mission of my organization is my priority while in country, the problems faced by the people who are most affected by climate change are indirectly my problems, and that it is my responsibility to ensure that certain voices need to be heard. Many of the issues surrounding our topic involve the lack of knowledge people have about climate change. The information that is available about climate change issues in Zambia are only accessible by a small number of the population. So being able to write a paper that thoroughly analyzes the current climate change situation in Zambia will allow me to not only serve as a resource for Action aid but also as a messenger, relaying information from government officials to the people most affected by the actions of the government.

In the context of my research project, I am devoting my time and energy to creating a paper that will be useful for my organization. However, service can be much broader than what will be outlined in my research paper. Service can encompass various elements and may require a longer time span than our two months in Zambia. This weekend, a group of us spent four days living the life of a peace core volunteer in Chongwe, a rural village about an hour outside of Lusaka. Our volunteer was focused on working in HIV research and treatment and had been living in Zambia for almost a year. Although she knew that HIV was too big of a problem for her to simply reverse, she was doing a great amount of service for her community by just being a resource for the people who lived there. She made an effort to have open conversations about HIV with the people who were most affected, educated children in the community about safe sex and HIV prevention, and worked with her homestay mother at a test and treatment facility. As a Peace Core volunteer, she intends to devote 2 to 5 years of her life to her community before moving on with her career goals. The type of service she and other volunteers do is so inspirational mainly because of the degree of devotion to an issue a person would have to have in order to leave their life in the United States behind and spend a significant amount of time working in a foreign country.

In conclusion, service can take many shapes. It can take place over a short or long period of time. It may involve a group of 10 students or just one person. All in all, no matter what gets done, any degree of service is extremely valuable. Whether you yourself are directly affected or not, service is way for you to take on new issues and work with others to find solutions. Service is thus so important because it allows you to connect with others, get involved in ways you could never imagine, and have an impact on the lives of others.

Blog post 2 in country

Blog Post #2

James Hickling

6/26/17

            After spending 3 weeks in Zambia, I feel as though I have seen service in action. Living 4 days in Chainda with our Peace Corps volunteer Sunni, I have seen how someone can completely dedicate themselves to a cause at the cost of great personal sacrifice. True, honest sacrifice is something that is extremely rare, and I feel that it defines service.

            Sunni has chosen to give up all the amenities of the western world such as plumbing, electricity, wifi, and a thousand other small comforts, to teach AIDS advocacy and education in her Zambian community. The commitment that peace corps volunteers make is not for the faint of heart, as one lives as the locals do, for a total of two years. It is one thing to visit a country, take pictures, and leave, and another to completely immerse one’s self in the language and culture for an extended period.

            Although I feel as though I am taking part in service to a certain degree, my own work pales in comparison to that of Sunni. What we are doing is theoretically called “Service-Learning,” but I feel as though there is more learning than service. True, I am working on a research paper in the area of HIV and AIDS with the goal to shed more light on ineffective government policy, but it is unclear if this paper will make any distinct contribution to the public health movement in this country.

            What Sunni does on a day to day basis is far more in depth, interacting with individuals with HIV every day, teaching them about their disease, its transmission and prevention. She is on the ground, making a real tangible difference every day.

            I truly hope that my contribution to this country will be a positive one, and that my research will yield fruits for my research organization and, hopefully, the HIV AIDS community in Zambia, and I will work hard to that end. At the bare minimum, I hope to make a positive impact on the Zambians that I meet, representing my school, country, and family well in the international community.

            I would love to write that everyone who takes part in service is motivated by a pure, selfless desire to improve the living conditions of others with no personal benefit to themselves, but that would not be telling the truth. Although many are selfless and sacrifice much for service, including myself, the vast majority do so to some end that is not entirely selfless. This experience in Zambia is something that I am proud of and excited about, and I did it, among other reasons, to explore whether I was interested in a career in public health and/or medicine, as well as to gain experience in this field for future opportunities. Even Sunni told me of her ambitions and how peace corps field experience is a huge asset in getting a job in the public health field. To that end, perhaps my own service and the service of others is not entirely purely selfless and romantic, but nonetheless it seeks to achieve a positive impact on the community here, and that is really all that one can ask.

In-Country Blog Post #2: Service

Service is when you provide something for those who need help and it comes in a variety of forms (i.e. giving access to education, food, etc.). The biggest thing about service is that a reward isn’t a requirement when wanting to help. It’s benefitting others without receiving anything in return, sort of like altruism. Community service and volunteering are the two things that automatically come to mind.

What motivates me to serve is that I have the opportunity to make a change in someone’s life. My neighborhood isn’t the best; those who live in the five boroughs would prefer to not even be in the Bronx. Most people actually call it the dirtiest borough. Despite this, there were leaders in the community whose purpose was to improve the environment. Growing up I felt like there was nothing I could do. I wouldn’t be able to make a change in my community because one, I didn’t have any money and two, I wasn’t an adult. My middle school nurse changed my perspective; whether small or big, whatever we can do to create a positive impact is a good thing.

I started doing community service in middle school because we all needed a certain amount of hours to graduate. Our school nurse would find opportunities for us to volunteer and each activity was different. From cleaning parks on the weekends to making Christmas cards for the Pediatric Cancer Foundation, I was eager to help out. Although they were a requirement, completing community service projects became something to look forward to every year.

When I got to high school, it wasn’t a requirement anymore but I continued to work with 92Y, a nonprofit community center based in the city. They usually had seasonal events that you could volunteer for and my friends and I would always sign up. Once I started 10^th grade, I began volunteering at Kips Bay Boys and Girls Club. They held afterschool programs for grades 1-12 to help keep kids off the streets. The best thing about Kips Bay was the message they would always give to the kids: we can make it out of our neighborhood and go on to do great things in the future. It’s important to hear that from people who care about you because it’s not said too often.

When thinking of the word service, the research placements never came to mind. Looking back on what I define service as, I see that our placements embody that. My service placement is amazing because currently there isn’t another organization in Zambia doing the same thing. The SANI Foundation has a school attached and they provide classes for eighteen students. The classes range from literacy and arts and crafts to hygiene and sex education. The goal is to find employment for their students. So far, they have been able to help six people find jobs and they hope to do the same for as many of their students as they can. What they’re doing comes with many obstacles, mainly funding. They have the capacity to take on 30 students but due to limited funding, they can only handle the eighteen.

Measuring success varies from person to person depending on what he or she wants to accomplish. Sometimes success in service is even measured by gratitude. The research Erica and I are working on focuses on ways to alter people’s attitudes towards people with disabilities. There isn’t any literature on how we can achieve that so it’s a challenge to come up with effective recommendations. It’s not often that we get the opportunity to contribute new information to ongoing research. If the SANI Foundation, or any similar organization, uses our research to make a change in communities, that would be a success for me.

In Country Blog Post 2

Service means doing work that focuses on what we can do for others at the expense of ourselves. This does not mean that we don’t benefit in some way, but it means that the purpose does not focus on us. The purpose is what we can do to benefit others. Throughout my life, I have looked to medical professionals to develop my understanding of service. Many work long hours sacrificing time for themselves and their families for the wellbeing of their patients. They advocate for the best care for their patients during times when they are sick and vulnerable.  In return patients trust doctors with their life and wellbeing. This dynamic is unique and motivates me to become a medical professional someday.

Working in my service placement for the past two weeks and learning about intellectual disabilities in the context of Zambia has made me feel guilty in some ways. When I used to think of global health, I had never thought about people with disabilities let alone intellectual disabilities. I imagined the most vulnerable groups to be women and children but as I learned in the past two weeks, women and children with intellectual disabilities are the most vulnerable.  People with disabilities are often not included within Zambia society. At a time when new schools, hospitals, and other infrastructure are being build, it is essential to be thinking about all types of disabilities to avoid those who are vulnerable from being excluded from society. I have had the privilege to have never felt excluded from my community based on social norms, an inaccessible and unwelcoming environment that has been set in place. From working in my service placement, I learned that people with disabilities do not have special needs. They have the same needs as everyone else. The environment, both social and physical, that people without disabilities have created is not inclusive to those same needs. Needs like acceptance, belonging, having access to the community you live in, being able to use resources that are meant for everyone, having the same opportunities to live a fulfilling life and contribute to society. This is a problem that both high and low income countries face which may be the reason that disabilities were not included in my image of what global health is. But one significant difference I learned is disabilities are more prevalent in low income countries and are more associated with poverty, limited access to education, healthcare, and employment. Global health focuses on everyone having access to health resources. When we think of everyone, we must remember to include people with disabilities in that picture.

I also learned from my service placement that sometimes your work in service will not directly benefit individual people but it will benefit the whole population by laying down work that can be used for policy change or larger scale changes. Unlike the medical profession where your work effects individual people very quickly, doing research at an NGO will take time for the results to reach the right people and be implemented. Measuring success in service is all about the outcome. It is about how close you are to reaching your goal that pertains to what you can do for others. Doing research with an NGO, measuring success will take extra time and patience to see the impact.