This spring break I went on an Aquinas House Alternative Spring Break trip to Phoenix, Ariz., and worked at Maggie's Place, a home for homeless pregnant women. I was impressed with the personal way the staff and volunteers at Maggie's Place approach their work. It is easy, especially for Dartmouth students who are so isolated from, well, everything, to think of service and charity in a pretty impersonal way. We give money to Haiti, or we help rebuild a house with Habitat for Humanity, or we run a clothing drive, but there is a tendency to spend relatively little time talking with or thinking about the people we are helping. As Mother Theresa said, "Today it is fashionable to talk about the poor. Unfortunately, it is not fashionable to talk with them."
Now I know this isn't true for everyone, nor for every organization with which Dartmouth students volunteer. But it has generally been true in my and my friends' experience. I don't think I ever spent a significant amount of time with the people I have done service work for before this trip. This is problematic, because as important as giving money or rebuilding houses is, people aren't just bodies and they don't just have material needs. Materially aiding the poor is necessary, but it became clear to me that it is equally important to remember that they have emotional and spiritual needs that can be even more pressing than their material ones.
The poor and the homeless are, at least in America, often so because they lack a network of family or friends who could have helped to support them when they hit a rough patch. That means that they are usually as starving for human contact as they are for food. I think that as good a job as our generation does with stepping up to provide financial support for charities, there is still room for improvement in how we approach our service. We can still learn how to approach it in a personal way, so that we can help meet the needs of the whole person. At Maggie's Place, for example, the staff actually live in the homes with the mothers and eat meals with them on a regular basis. It's that kind of spirit that could make our service into something even more beautiful and effective.
The Maggie's Place staff has a saying: "There's no love in government money." The conservative in me loved that. Then, however, I had to ask myself how much love there was in my money. Do I really care for the people I'm serving? Do I show it? Or do I just write a check and the next day forget about the person I wrote it for? Too often, at least for me, it's the latter. Moreover, that doesn't only fail the people I'm trying to help; it fails me.
Because I also learned at Maggie's Place that as much as the affluent can help the poor (not only with money, but also with love), the poor can return the favor. There's a lot about being human that we can learn from those less fortunate than us. Impersonal service, therefore, is a missed opportunity for all involved.
Mother Theresa also said, "Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat." Maggie's Place showed me that personal service service in which we are present as persons to those we serve and in which we view those we serve not as abstract entities but also as persons like ourselves has to potential to meet both kinds of hunger. We just have to be willing, despite all the accompanying risks and discomfort, to try it.