Further Reflection

I am using this blog post to further reflect on my service work in the Washington Neighborhood. I have thus far completed 22.5 of my goal of 30 hours of service. I have volunteered at Saint Patrick’s Parish a total of five times thus far for a total of 13 hours. I plan on volunteering at the dinner another three times to complete my service hour requirement. In the three weeks since my last post about service, I have worked with three different groups that put on the dinner. The only time that I have worked with the same group of people was two weeks ago when the Saint Patrick’s people organized the dinner as they had during my first week. Despite the fact that this meal was organized by the same group of people, there were still volunteers that I had not previously worked with. My third dinner was run by a group of union workers. This was a very different experience than any other as it was the most organized out of the five thus far. I expected this to be the case as I thought that a group of people who were a part of a union would be very organized and that they would run the dinner in that same manner. The most recent dinner was organized by a group from Holy Family Catholic Schools. This group brought in prepared food as the group from St. Columkille had done during my second week. I think the best part about working with new groups each week is meeting and being able to talk to different people.

After having volunteered for five dinner thus far, I feel that I have a good sense of what tasks need to be performed and I have had to focus less time on figuring out what to do and this has enable me to spend more time noticing things about the people that attend the dinner. I first started to notice specific things two weeks ago when I had the duty of serving chicken nuggets to everyone. The meal is organized so that every person gets an initial serving of food and then they can go back up for seconds after everyone had been fed. A few people asked for extra food the first time through the line and I had to tell them that they could come up later for more. A few people were perfectly fine with hearing this news while others were visibly upset. One man even went as far as to come back through the line again and ask for a tray with just chicken nuggets. I have also noticed that while serving milk, people will come back up and ask for more milk and say that they did not receive any when they went through the line the first time. We knew that they received milk the first time through and are more than happy to give them more, but they feel as though they must lie in order to receive it. Last week while I was eating, they called for seconds and there was mad dash to get in line. We then observed some people taking that food and storing it in containers and leaving. There is supposed to be absolutely no carry-outs, but people do so anyway. The conclusions that I have drawn from this sort of behavior is that many of the people that attend the dinner feel as though they must lie or attempt to cheat the system in order to get enough food. We are more than willing to give everyone as much food as they want so no deception is needed. The people feel that they must be competitive in order to get what they want because that is what they have encountered throughout their lives and this does not change for them when they attend the meals. A small minority of the people will do anything to try and get ahead.

I have spent my other 9.5 hours of service working two Saturday mornings in and around the Washington neighborhood. The first 4 hours were as a part of the Washington Neighborhood clean-up in which I walked through the neighborhood picking up trash. The most noticeable thing that I saw was that there were very few people actually helping to clean-up the neighborhood. I know that there were some people that were working extremely hard, but I had just hoped to see more involvement from the people that lived in the area. I believe that walking through the alleys and many of the streets for an entire morning gave me a much better sense of what life is really like in the Washington Neighborhood. The second Saturday consisted of 5.5 hours of service as a part of the Dubuque winterizing challenge. This was a very organized service project with hundreds of volunteers where the main goal was to make the homes of Dubuque more energy efficient for the winter. I was a part of group that helped at three residencies where the people were of Hispanic heritage. I think this was actually a very good experience because it gave me a look into the lives of a sub-culture of people that live within the city of Dubuque. There was a language barrier in some cases, but that did not affect our duties of helping to prepare the houses for winter. The next time that I mention my service in this blog I will have completed my hourly requirement. I hope that I can use my last 7.5 hours to notice even more about the people that attend the dinners.