The simplicity of service

By Kay Ben-Avraham `08

I wanted to take French in high school. The school I attended, however, offered a meager selection of two languages: Spanish and American Sign Language. And since I had heard the rumors about the Spanish teacher, I signed up for Sign Language—no pun intended.

If you had asked me two years ago what that has to do with service learning at Messiah College, I probably wouldn’t have had an answer for you. That’s the ironic and unexpected nature of volunteer work, as a friend of mine told me after her weekly visit to an inner-city locale where she tutored junior high kids. You go to teach; you find yourself learning. You think you’re clueless; you discover that, sometimes, your loving presence is all that’s needed.

For half a semester of my junior year, I joined a group of student volunteers led by another upperclassman, in tandem with the Agape Center. We drove each week to the Paxton Street Home in Harrisburg, where mentally challenged or otherwise disadvantaged adults are provided with affordable housing, food, and an interactive and loving community. Our first day, we got a tour of the place: meeting and dining halls, rec room, even a “spa station” downstairs for the lady residents.

I had anticipated some kind of work, like scrubbing toilets or serving food in the cafeteria. That kind of service made sense to me. So when we were instructed, at dinnertime, to get some food and just mingle with the residents, I felt woefully out of place. A roomful of strangers—what was I supposed to say? Where should I sit? I considered explaining that they were really better off using me as a dish washer or something, but all the others were already lined up with their food trays, so I sighed and joined them.

It felt strange, that week, returning to campus with the sense that we hadn’t really participated in “service” at all. We’d driven out there, eaten their food, laughed and talked with a few people, and left. I had this subconscious certainty that service meant my arms ought to be sore when I got home. So what was this? What good was I doing?

The trip that following week provided a couple revelations. I must have written on my application form that I had a conversational grasp of Sign Language, because when we arrived, the volunteer director rushed up to me excitedly and said that Lou was here this week, and he’d love to talk with me. Lou was mostly deaf, she explained, and sometimes the other residents had trouble communicating with him.

I sat with Lou at dinner that evening, chatting with my hands and feeling surprisingly useful. He was patient when I had to fingerspell words I couldn’t remember the signs for, and my grammar was atrocious, but the conversation managed to cover sports, how he liked life at Paxton Street, and international politics. Lou had read reports about what was happening in Darfur, and he made the signs for my heart is hurting. “You have a good heart, then,” I signed back, smiling. His response was complicated; I had to ask him to repeat some of the signs. It seemed that he was saying, what human heart would not hurt?

Not once did I come home with sore arms that semester. The volunteer director told us how the residents loved our visits and looked forward to our arrival each week, and I remembered how the verse runs in the New Testament: “For I was sick, and you looked after me; I was in prison, and you visited me” (Matt. 25:36). Not, “I was in prison and you scrubbed my cell for me.” Just “you visited me.”

Sometimes, I guess, service entails no more than that: your own particular presence in the life of someone who needs company.