A Time to be Weird

GEP Assistant Director, Katherine Hafer, above left, demonstrates how to use a circular saw, while repairing a well in Maine.  Below, she blogs about this recent community service experience:

I spent the last week working at H.O.M.E., an organization based in Orland, Maine that strives to ensure life’s basic needs: shelter, food, water, education, and work.  H.O.M.E. is a place that gives everyone a chance, including those who could find a chance nowhere else. It’s part of the Emmaus International movement, which serves the world’s poorest.  One evening, the volunteer coordinator offered, “When you pass a person in a ditch, don’t reach your hand down to pull them out.  Get down in the ditch and rise out from it with them.” Her words point to an important aspect of life at H.O.M.E.: everyone works together, respectful of the talents and the obstacles of one another.

With experience in carpentry, I was given the role of leader and mentor to the young adults, whose grades ranged from seventh to twelfth.   Not only did I have the opportunity to lead a team in reinforcing a Section 8 house to make it safe and livable but I also had the chance to help teenagers from an affluent area learn to approach, empathize with, and learn from people who appear and live very differently from the way that they are used to.  But most importantly, I got to teach middle schoolers how to operate a circular saw.

What stood out to me most of all was the context in which a certain word kept coming from the mouths of the young people in our group:  One night after dinner, a high school girl expressed how much she appreciated time she and the other youth had to bond on their own, because they needed “time to just be weird.”  I heard this word, “weird,” again and again throughout the week, and was reminded of how frequently I used it as a teen.  Kids are weird.

But what does this self-declared alienation mean?  I believe it is how kids express that they do not want to meet our arbitrary, adult expectations.  It is an expression of their desire to be themselves, relaxed and natural, without straining to conform to (adult) societal demands.  They seek to nurture their unfiltered self, this person who they are and are trying to become.  And how crucial it is that we adults respect this!  All people have a right to assert and fulfill themselves as they are.

Even the rising seniors of the group readily self-identified as kids.  They did not hesitate to make clear how crazy they thought our adult ways are. This included everything from drinking coffee to over-planning, discussing, and managing even the simplest of events and tasks.  Yet, for the most part, they always treated each other and the adults with respect.  Could I say the same for the way the adults of our group treated the youth?

The experience at H.O.M.E. was not a casual one in any way.  As a group, we worked together, cooked and ate together, and even slept all together in H.O.M.E.’s learning center library.  At times, emotions ran high, but this allowed me to be able to get to know some of these teens on a personal level.  Each time I asked one of them about their pursuits, they responded with surprise and excitement.  Several of them asked if I could give them feedback on college essays.  They looked at me more as an ally than an adult.  I’m relieved to know that I might yet be a little weird myself.

Tags: Add new tag, Community Outreach

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 9th, 2009 at 3:59 pm and is filed under Academic Tutoring. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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