Service-Learning Changes the World

            Service-learning is a two way street.  On the one hand, service includes giving back to the community and bettering the place that you and many others live.  On the other hand, learning entails that you are learning about the people, places, and things around you as well as learning about yourself along the way.  Experiencing both of these things at the same time will help some people understand the world around them and appreciate what they have been blessed with.  Through the stories and experiences that our guest speaker shared with us during today’s class, it is extremely obvious that she has learned a lot about herself and about the world around her.

            Kelly attended the University of Richmond for four years and in that time span her life completely changed for the better.  She went into college thinking that she was going to be a leadership major and though all the experiences that she had during her college career, ended up creating her own major.  She took advantage of so many different opportunities that were offered to her including studying abroad in Spain for an entire year trying to help the greater good.  One of the things that stuck out in my mind from her presentation today was the following quote:  “Social change has less to do with your personal leadership skills but more about uplifting others to work towards their own empowerment.”   These are the words that she has based her life off of and they are very powerful.  I believe that this quote means that if you focus more on helping others be the best that they can be, you will have accomplished more than if you had focused on your own skills.

            Some of the ways that Kelly embraced this concept was, as mentioned before, traveling abroad.  She has traveled to many places including Spain, Guatemala, and Ireland.  While she was on these trips, she did many things to help the people around her such as renovating old cooking shacks so that the people would not be inhaling as much soot and dying early on in their lives.  One of the main things that she studied and ended up writing her senior thesis on was about refugee camps all over the world.  She learned that the fate of the people in the refugee camps was based off of a lottery ticket.  If your number was called, then you were allowed to leave the camp and make a life for yourself in a first world country.  While in Richmond, she was actually fortunate enough to meet someone who was at one of these refugee camps and was making a life for herself in the United States.  The most humbling part was the fact that she found out the woman she was talking too, Abuk, was exactly the same age that Kelly was, 19.

            The advantages of service-learning are never ending.  The people who dedicate their lives to this type of work are owed so much.  Without people like Kelly trying to make a difference across the world, planet Earth would be a terrible place to live.