Service Learning, Service Living.

By Anna Box

It was a cool fall day in the far eastern Kentucky hamlet where I had lived for a little over a year. I knew most of the town’s 200 or so citizens on sight. I had jogged all the paved roads scores of times–past the bank, the post office, and the gas station that housed a deli and tanning bed too many times to count.

Ninth graders recently packaged food for the needy at Queen Anne Food Bank.

City services in our area were almost non-existent. We had electricity and cable, but no garbage collection and certainly no recycling. The coal mine owner down the road liked us, so he plowed our driveway when it snowed.  We were lucky that way. Others had to shovel if they were able, or simply wait on the snow to melt if they weren’t strong enough to shovel. 

This day there was no snow. But we had tons of recycling we had been saving for months.  

I worked for an organization that used volunteers to repair homes for residents who had no way to pay for the repairs.  We patched roofs, installed plumbing, upgraded electricity–all in an effort to help folks be warmer, safer, and dryer. The volunteers came from all over the country and stayed with us for a week or a weekend. During the summer we were especially busy–a couple hundred volunteers a week working on a dozen or more houses.  Things slowed down in the fall–a few dozen volunteers a weekend, maybe a college group on fall break.  

When the volunteers were on site, we fed and housed them in an old school our little non-profit had purchased and renovated. We turned classrooms into dormitories and the old gym into a warehouse. We upgraded the kitchen and served family style meals to the volunteers. The staff, seven of us during the summers, three during the school year, lived at the center. We drove barely working pick-up trucks and vans that had been donated long after their viable lives were in their own rearview mirrors. 

It had been an interesting year for me. I came to the project after having taught school for about a decade. During these years as a math teacher, I had been introduced to this non-profit organization when I agreed to go along as a chaperone for a group of our students. I loved it. I loved the hard work, the progress that was visible by the end of the week, the peace of the rural small town, and a chance to make a difference. I volunteered each summer after the first–never disappointed in the work of changing a little small corner of the world. When a full-time job opened with the nonprofit, I took a chance and applied. The project took a chance and hired me.

The first fall I was in Kentucky I noticed a few things. The soil had so much coal in it that the ground was gray, not brown. There was a maple tree whose leaves shriveled rather than fell off–when the wind blew the leaves literally shivered. There was a noticeable and common aroma in the homes I visited–coal heat combined with the homey smells of strong coffee and the ubiquitous soup beans most folks ate daily.  

The vast majority of our clients were families, often with several generations living in a small place.  All were generous and accepting of me and our teams–offering coffee on cool days, a seat on the porch on warm afternoons, and if we were very lucky, some guitar and banjo music.  

I also noticed that all of our clients were people with hopes and dreams. Some folks were simply down on their luck. Several had lost everything due to medical crises. Others were stuck on the wrong side of the local system of haves and have nots.

On this particular day I had been living this life long enough to no longer feel like a visitor or an outsider. I had grown accustomed to the quiet, the neighborliness, and the shivering maples. We had a good summer. We met our goals in terms of volunteer hours and repairs made. We also had made great friends with the families we served and were beginning to settle into the slower pace of the fall.

One of the chores we had been putting off all summer was our recycling. Staff members were committed recyclers and we encouraged our volunteers to do likewise. We had saved a summer’s worth of cans, bottles, and plastic in large bins in the warehouse.   

Today the time had come to cart dozens of trash bags of recycling to the nearest recycling center–two hours away. Not wanting to take a chance that something would blow out of the back of one of the pick-ups, I loaded the bags into one of the vans and took off for Lexington. As the roads straightened and the valleys opened up into a more pastoral landscape, the temperature of the day warmed as well. As the temperature increased, so did the stench of the recycling.  In self defense, I rolled the window down and leaned out as far as I could and still drive safely.  

Driving along, leaning my head against my left arm, feeling the warm sun on my face, I recognized a familiar scent. Not the stench of the recycling. But something else. Something I knew.  After a few minutes I recognized it as the aroma of rural homes in eastern Kentucky–coal heat, coffee, soup beans. But how was this possible? I was in a van full of recycling, not in the kitchen of one of our clients. I doubted my senses. But there it was again–the unmistakable smell of Appalachian poverty.  Where was it coming from? The van’s heating? No. The scent stayed when the heat was on and off. The houses I passed on the road? No–it didn’t seem to matter if I was near a home or not.  The recycling? Nope–it still smelled like old pop bottles. As I stuck my head farther out of the window to avoid the inside of the van, I realized that I was smelling my own jacket. I personally was the scent. I had become the people we served. 

This experience, the physical change in me and to me, is how I came to understand service learning. Service changed me. Physically. Viscerally. Permanently. 

Maybe I changed the world a little bit through my service. I hope so. But my service undoubtedly changed me. I know so. Ultimately I returned to math teaching, but with new knowledge about the hardships some people face, with a different perspective about myself and my needs, and with a commitment to always be on the side of the oppressed or unlucky.