Service of Faith

My event of choice was a volunteering opportunity for after school homework help. It turned out to relate to our course material a good deal more than I thought it did initially. The most obvious connection is to Father Peter-Ham Kolvenbach’s “The Service of Faith and the Promotion of Justice”. Obviously, helping people anywhere constitutes as both of these. However, my service experience also involves our theme of boundaries that has run through most of the works we have read so far, beginning with Whale Rider. The boundary is that which separates my kind of life from that which my student, as a girl living in inner city Baltimore, experiences.

Kelsey Carolina is a seventh grader at Mother Seton Academy near Fells Point in Baltimore. Before I had ever met her, Sister Karen, the service coordinator for MSA, told me that Kelsey needed immense amounts of help in all areas. Apparently, she was behind in all of her classes. So, naturally, I did not really know what to expect. First of all, I wasn’t even sure what kinds of curriculum you learn in seventh grade, much less how I would know if she was up to their standards. So, we were introduced.

When we met, I could tell that Kelsey had been through a lot. She was a beautiful girl, but she seemed kind of nervous and anxious. I helped her do her math homework, and she sped through it as if it was her last moment on earth. As it turned out, her tendency to do everything so quickly led to her downfall. She was incredibly smart, yet raced through everything and made simple mistakes. I was amazed, because Sister Karen had given me the impression that Kelsey was unintelligent. I took note to get my own impressions of people, not others’.

The reason I began volunteering in the first place was for one of my classes, yet I learned the benefits of a Jesuit education from this, and now I am continuing with it. After all, according to Father Kolvenbach, Jesuit institutions were “originally founded to serve the educational and religious needs of poor immigrant populations” (22). While Kelsey is not necessarily an immigrant, she is basically in their same situation. The phrase “the service of faith and the promotion of justice” refers to “an action-oriented commitment to the poor with a courageous personal option” (27). What Kolvenbach means here is that students are supposed to be placed into these situations in order to gain the desire to be there helping people. He wants us to choose justice for other people. “Men and women for others” (29).

I think one of the boundaries I could put on this experience is one of the visible and almost racial boundaries of Baltimore itself. While I’m not aware of any railroad-type boundaries such as those Jane Jacobs speaks of, there are obvious differences between the Baltimore that Loyola is in and the Baltimore of Mother Seton Academy. It seems unreal the way you pass into the worse areas. Perhaps these are mental boundaries that people create. They could be racist boundaries, or just physical boundaries. Either way, the boundaries are unmistakably there, and I think reducing these boundaries is one of the main objectives of the Year of the City.

I’m looking forward to continuing my volunteering with Kelsey. I feel like I can do a lot to help her achieve what she wants. She wants to go to college eventually, but is going to need “promotion of justice,” and she may even need to break a few boundaries. It is highly unlikely that children of her status make it to a university, but breaking boundaries is an important theme in our course, and in the real world. Hopefully, I can be a part of her attempt to break racial and socioeconomic barriers.