Well, I'm sure some of you have checked up on my blog only to see that I appeared to have died in Argentina in June of this year. My trip details are etched out in a word document that I increasingly lagged in writing. Sometimes in the course of documenting your life, you get lost living it. We're almost a year after my very first day and I have to say that Argentina still rises and sets with the sun, almost as my sun every single day. It rattles around in my heart and flickers constantly in my mind. Argentina, I am a thunderstorm for you.
I'm still coming to terms with Argentina and how it changed me, but meanwhile, I am now on my Alternative Service Break (ASB) with my university in Atlanta, Georgia.
So what's an ASB trip?
It's a university coordinated volunteering trip to specific domestic and international sites to give students opportunities for service work in new places with new people. And it happens over 2/3 of our winter break...so we're giving up that time to give our time to others. Maybe that sounds self righteous, but we do work hard. And unlike some volunteering projects that are poorly organized, we are working full days doing a variety of tasks to keep us on our feet (literally...). We met weekly for 2 months leading up to the trip to get to know one another and discuss the issues and our motives/goals/expectations for the trip. We all had ideas but something tells me those will change and grow as we do on the trip.
Hotlanta Dream Team 2012 consists of 11 students and a staff member from various majors and walks of life. Not to mention all those on the ground that we're serving with. We're volunteering at 3 different organizations for the next 12 days: Open Hand Project (a super charged soup kitchen of a different sort), Berea Mennonite church and Mad Housers (homeless shelter).
Perhaps the most notable thing about the ASB trip is the word service. I say "those we serve with" not only to refer to the coordinators and supervisors of the organizations we're partnered with, but also those of whom we are "serving". This is to avoid the connotative power constructs that can come with words like "help" , meaning they are unable to help themselves, without paying attention to the contexts of the service. Thus the other key aspect of this trip: the story. We're not pretending to solve poverty, hunger or even complete all the projects we've undertaken--what we can do is listen to the stories of those with whom we interact, giving us better tools to continue to tackle the problem as well as figuring out how they play a role in our stories as individuals, lending our creativity, perspective and diligence to make a change in the world, if only but for a moment.
This is key for me, because after 2 conversations with complete strangers on a park bench in Mendoza, Argentina, I realized that the meaning of life is the story: telling ours, hearing others', changing our stories, changing others', adding new chapters and rewriting some. The narrative paradigm, as it's called, is a real theory and at its heart suggests that we're all storytellers, so here I am telling you part of mine.
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