Andres Carrera

Ping & Amy Chao Family Foundation

Prompt 1

5/28/10

It's all those good things you have in you. The love, the wisdom, the generosity, the selflessness, the patience. That’s what service to others requires. It’s mercy when there shouldn’t be. It’s compassion where none ought to exist. It’s the decision to be human when everything around you is encouraging otherwise and no one would blame you for a second if you weren’t. Community service is more than just a few hours spent at the Salvation Army, United Way, or Rescue Mission. It’s a mindset, an attitude, a disposition that places others- complete strangers, even- before yourself in the hope that you’re achieving something meaningful.

In the fall of 2006, I founded an organization called Youth for Parker. Realizing a need for service to the community and an overwhelming amount of teens with free time, my group strived to create fun, safe, and inexpensive activities for the youth in our town to enjoy. The group became successful very quickly, as membership increased from five people to 45 members, event attendance shot up from 50 kids to an average of 85. By the end of my time with YFP, I had raised over 22,000 dollars for the organization, and accrued the sponsorship of 12 local business owners. On a personal note, as a Hispanic youth in a town still clinging to vestiges of racial segregation, I found it fascinating that my organization’s acts of kindness spanned across all sorts of barriers- religious, ethnic, and otherwise- like bridges to greater understanding. Above all, however, In working for YFP, I realized that life wasn’t about me.

I started out as a volunteer. I don’t think I fully understood at the time what I was getting myself into, only knowing that it was a good way to get involved in the community. Little did I know that my heart and soul was going to be consumed by its entirety.

After a few months of service I was voted in by the 30 members as president, and boy did I have an aggressive agenda for my group. I sought to increase membership, expand influence, network with other groups like ours in the community, and provide more fun events, as we were a service group dedicated to providing safe activities to the youth in our town. I might have lost sight along the way of why I was doing what I was doing; it seemed I was after being able to say that I succeeded rather than saying I served.

And then we organized a service project at an old folks home. We got about 15 kids to show up to clean, and put on events for the senior citizens living there. There was a moment there when I found myself alone with a group helping serve food. It was then that I realized that the agreed upon time to leave the home had passed, and I that had stayed for hours longer. What struck me was that I didn’t get tired. I didn’t complain once. I just didn’t feel a need to. I listened to the people around me tell stories of their lives- their time in the war, with their kids, with their grandkids- and I realized again how much people matter. They were all that I had. People are all that we have. I found myself as a piece of this big puzzle, but with one burning question in my mind: how can I help everyone?

This revelation came to be useful in my life. While working at soup kitchens and homeless shelters through my organization, things at home were beginning to take a turn for the worst. I failed in my relationship with my parents.

I came to this conclusion one night after seeing the life coach, psychiatrist, and social worker assigned to our case in the span of a week. I got the sense that something awful had happened.

All the while I told myself to keep hanging on, to learn from the experience before me.

It’s how I found out how important volunteer service was in my life- right after a fistfight with my dad, the only thing that seemed to console me was the prospect of making someone else’s day at a homeless shelter, or keeping things running at a soup kitchen- places where I felt worth something.

That was a year ago. Now I understand that my mom and my dad are the only parents I’ll ever have, and have since put my relationship with them as my priority. Through all the hatred and violence that consumed my junior year, I learned to love, and love deeply.

Community service allowed me to realize that I’m someone who cares. I care about the person that fell down in front of everyone unlike everyone else does: I’m able to think about that person in the context of their life story because I cared enough to listen to him at lunch when everyone else just wanted him to go away. I care for the pregnant janitor at our school because I know the struggles of a single mom who can barely speak English who came to this country anyway for a better life for her daughter. It’s not something I can turn on, or off. It’s just something that is in my life. It’s as much a part of me as the color blue is to the sky. Though, I’m not just a bleeding heart. I have a sense of purpose, one cradled in a thinking, active mind. This is what pushes me forward. This is what separates me from everyone else- my ability to look at a situation and overcome it, all while smiling.

But more importantly, it’s how I learned to love people. I see service as a means to achieving the once idealistic and by doing so making it realistic. Mahatma Ghandi once spoke of losing yourself in the service to others- and fortunately, I did just that.

Word Count: 1003