Sunday-- Excursions and Reflections

This morning we slept in and had breakfast at the hostel. There was a St. Patrick's Day parade on Constitution Ave. so some of us walked down and stood on the sidewalk watching the parade pass by.

Later in the afternoon we jumped on the Metro to go down to Bethesda for a meeting with the assistant director of the Project to End Human Trafficking. She gave us a presentation about human trafficking and sort of the lay of the land of the issue. There are between 4 million and 27 million people enslaved at any one time, but what we were thinking about on the way back is how subjective the definition of slavery can be for each researcher, which can lead to discrepancy in the numbers and different understandings of the issue. We also learned from another person's research that there are 246 million kids, ages 5-17, presently involved in some type of debt bondage or forced labor, which many of us would consider slavery, but others may not. So the question arises, who is being missed and why? What can be done for the people not being counted in these numbers and therefore not receiving these services?

So tonight our reflection centered on the questions we were pondering after the presentation, and also general questions about what it means to do service in a community of survivors. We again convened after dinner (stirfry!) in the girls room and talked as a group about the events of the day. We started by talking about what our individual expectations are for the week and what we want to learn, as well as where we want to go now that we have attended our first meeting. Definitions of service were a particularly important focus of our discussion, especially because our trip is perhaps less hands-on than other ASB trips. This quote sparked some real debate among us: When you help, you see life as weak. When you fix, you see life as broken. When you serve, you see life as whole.... Fixing and helping create a distance between people, but we cannot serve at a distance. We can only serve that to which we are profoundly connected....Fixing and helping may be the work of the ego, and service the work of the soul (Rachel Naomi Remen). Some of us understand service as something that produces a tangible end-result and our trip, which emphasizes learning, challenges us to rethink this. Service may be more of a mindset of sacrifice, as one member of our group suggested. But even so, when we leave here and go back to life at UMD, what do we leave with?