Learning from the Work of Our Hands

When people learn that my summer work involves not only teaching students Spanish in South America but also guiding them through in-country service work, they often nod their heads in approval.  Giving back to communities, be they U.S. communities or overseas communities, is seen as a noble, generous way to spend one's time.  While I agree, I have also realized that it can be hard to articulate why volunteer work is, generally, a good thing to do.

One valuable aspect of volunteer work that is often overlooked is the exposure it gives young people to work itself, in particular, work with one's hands.  When a person has time to dedicate weeks and months to a cause, working directly with other people can have the most impact and be extremely enriching and rewarding.  When one does not have much time to dedicate to a cause, however, as is the case with my students when we are traveling in South America, it is often better to focus on projects that do not set up expectations of a continued relationship.  Spending two days at an orphanage, for example, could do more harm than good for children who may already struggle with feelings of abandonment.  Consequently, the projects I have engaged in with my students have involved a lot of trail maintenance, planting, building, and painting and not a lot of working directly with locals in need.

Even if a landscape does not look remarkably different when we leave, and even if a community still struggles with the effects of poverty, I still believe in the value of these projects.  For one thing, taking on a project as volunteers means that a local volunteer or paid worker does not have to do it and can focus on some other community need.  In addition, I appreciate how these projects give my students experience with manual labor, especially since, for the most part, my students are college-bound, have "white-collar" career aspirations, and come from stable families with the means to support their teens as they grow into adulthood.  This means that, in all likelihood, my students have done very little (if any) manual labor and will have to do very little (if any) manual labor in the future.  Does this matter?

Well, yes, because no matter how many hours my students dedicate in their future careers to sitting before a computer or sitting in meetings, their patterns of life will depend on those who do physically exhausting work--in fields and mines, among half-finished house frames and tall trees, and in any number of environments where people labor primarily with their hands.  Having a personal experience with this kind of work generally gives my students greater respect for those hold down physically-demanding jobs day in and day out.

And what about giving back?  Indeed, you might be wondering if all I care about is how my students grow in maturity by serving as volunteers.  This does matter to me, but I also believe that gaining greater respect for work that is sometimes looked down on can encourage greater generosity, tolerance, and social engagement in my students' adult lives.  In this way, learning a lot as we give a little of our time can contribute to society in ways we never could have anticipated.

Can the experience of building an outhouse create social change? Yes!