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.