At my school each student is required to attend a service learning retreat. The retreats are scheduled for each grade level and this year I had the pleasure chaperoning the ten grade students (approximately 50 students) on their trip to the New York City YSOP (Youth Service Opportunities Project). This volunteer program was established in 1983 and my students had an opportunity to learn about the homeless and the hungry. Before I left for the retreat, I had already read a couple chapters in the book entitled “The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life” by R. Zander and B. Zander (2000).
Even though the retreat was for the students, I leaned an amazing amount. I will be the first to admit that my perception of the homeless has been jaded by my negative experience with homeless people. My most vivid image was of the man that lives on the street near my house. I often see him asking for money and the day I offered him food – he told me that bagels have too much starch for him. Honestly I still am annoyed that this man was so ungrateful. Thus this was the face I had and gave to all homeless people.
YSOP Washington, DC Video
At YSOP the students first had an introduction to the program and then they got to work cooking a meal for our dinner guests who were homeless and hungry. Obviously the students were nervous, but once the guests arrived they began mingling. Some of the guests taught the students how to play spades while others beat our students at the game “20 questions.” After we served dinner the guests went to sleep at the shelter across the street.
The students had an evening discussion and there were tons of wonderful observations. Students wondered why each of the guests was homeless. They were taken back that some of the guests had cell phones and others were surprised that the guests were so smart. They wondered how people that were smart became homeless. Other students became emotional when they realized how much they personally have and how little the guests did. My favorite observation was made by a number of students. The students wondered how the guests could be so happy and satisfied with life when they had little to nothing.
This discussion reminded me of the chapter of “The Art of Possibilities” that discusses how to step into a universe of possibility (Zander & Zander, 2000). The authors talk about how everything in our world is measured. In the case of people we are measured by how much or little we have. These lines were extremely clear to me before I had the experience of YSOP. The universe I was living in was very black and white in terms of homelessness, but now the lines have been blurred and partially erased. Based on my experiences I can see many more reasons why people become homeless and I realized I cannot always pick the homeless out of a crowd.
Some statistics that YSOP shared with us during the retreat were that nearly 65,000 people in New York city are homeless and approximately forty percent of these people are age under 18 years old. I am saddened by the statistics of homelessness, but hopefully with my new knowledge I will be able to see and actualize the world where less people are homeless.
Resources
Fiesta Movement YSOP - Mission 4 posted by mcfrank12 on August 31, 2009 to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=injxMF17xRE&feature=player_embedded
Zander, R. S., & Zander, B. (2000). The art of possibility: Transforming professional and personal life. New York: Penguin Group.
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What a great program. There's never too much learning that can come from such experiences and letting oneself be open to them. As a collage freshman I took a course in Existential Philosophy and one of the course requirements was to spend the night at a house that was run by an organization that had a soup kitchen in downtown LA and the morning following the overnight I worked in the soup kitchen for the morning and the roamed the streets until we were taken back to our campus (Loyola-Marymount University) in West LA. It was an amazing experience that I probably need to repeat more than once every thirty years.
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