Kirill Likhovid

Professor Green
EXPL 292
04/24/2016
Final Reflection
Loyola University Chicagos mission statement:
We are Chicago's Jesuit Catholic university- a diverse community
seeking God in all things and working to expand knowledge in the
service of humanity through learning, justice, and faith.
At the beginning of the semester, I did not have any idea of what
this course was about. We all were told that in order to travel to Peru
as a team, we all had to take this course and that was pretty much it.
To be honest, I think that was a good thing, because for me, at least, I
came in with a clean slate with no assumptions. After a couple of
weeks in the course, I became more familiar with what our trip and the
class were going to be about, service learning. Now I had done
community service before, but I had never delved so deep into the act.
I had never really put thought into what everyone around me was
thinking or what the outcome of the service was, and I had never
reflected on my service after the fact. All of this was about to change in
the coming weeks however.
We began with looking and analyzing the context, meaning
whom we were going to help, and who the people that were going to

help were. We were introduced to the concept of global citizenship and

were asked to reflect on what the term meant to us, in the form of a
blog. This began the step of understanding what kind of people we are
and what our thoughts on helping others were. For me being a global
citizen is synonymous with being a caring human being. I say this
because global citizenship involves being a part of the larger human
community of the world rather than their citizenship of a local
community, place, or nation. By being a part of this larger community,
one is able to see humanity as a whole instead of a broken up
collection of races and nationalities. So after this reflection, I was
feeling good and excited about going over to Peru in a few weeks to be
a global citizen and help people out.
The next step in our understanding of service was to understand
who we were going to affect and how it was going to affect them.
When we were told about this, I had a completely opposite view on
what we were going to learn. We were given an article written by Adam
Davis, about the effects of community service, to reflect on. In his
piece, Davis brought up multiple issues with community service that I
had never previously considered such as the fact that instead of
lessening the gap between helper and receiver, service actually
expands that gap because of the physiological aspect of service. He
stated that the giver gets a feeling of power and a feeling of being
more accomplished, while the receiver feels as though they are

dependent and inferior. He brings up many more issues similar to this

one, and after reading the piece, my optimism began to diminish as I
thought that I was not going to be able to help the people I would meet
in Peru. The next week we were introduced to another two articles that
dealt with the issues of community service by Morton, and Illich.
Mortons piece brought up the classic example of the starfish that were
washed up onto shore. He said that it was impossible to help all of
them and push all of them back in the water so there was really no
point. The reason this article stuck with me, though, is that Morton
brought up his ecological example. He said that maybe the starfish are
supposed to be washed up so that the birds could eat or that possibly
the starfish outgrew their habitat, so throwing them back into the
water without knowing the complexity of the ecosystem would be
harmful. The same applies to community service in that one should not
blindly go in to help other people without knowing everything about
their situation in order to not make the situation worse or throw off the
community they are in. Illich in his piece brings up a similar point, that
we as privileged, cannot understand what we are actually doing to the
other community we think we are helping. He says that it is impossible
for a connection to form between the less fortunate people that are
receiving the aid and the well-off people that are giving the aid. This
connection never occurs according to Illich because we are never able
to truly put ourselves in the shoes of the struggling Latin American

people. We, as educated Americans, simply do not understand the

communities, lifestyles, and people that we travel to help. Reading
these pieces again, affected my optimism for the trip and made me
wonder why we were ever going if all we were going to do was harm
the people of Peru.
At this point, it was almost time to leave for Lima and all of us
were still questioning whether or not we had the ability to do good in
Peru after understanding all of these issues with service. This is when
we were introduced with the concept of asset-based community
service. This concept is the idea of not bringing things in to help people
that they will never actually have, but working with what they have
available to them, in order to make their lives better. This way, when
we leave, the people there still have the foundation to keep going
because we helped them with what they actually have on a daily basis.
This concept carried over to our experience phase of our class, when
we actually arrived in Peru. We were immediately thrown into the daily
lives of the people there. The majority of our service work when we got
there was based around the sport of soccer, which is a major part of
life in Peru. We held training sessions for the kids and played soccer
with them. They will always have soccer with them and it will always
be a part of their lives so this service did not bring anything that they
didnt have into the equation. It was a huge example of asset-based
service because we used something that they had in order to make

their lives better. We were put on the same level as them through the
sport making us actually live out the global citizenship that we
reflected on prior to the trip. This service made me forget all about my
negative thoughts prior to the trip because I saw how happy and joyful
the kids were when we played and interacted with them. This is where
I was able to relate to the poem by Shao Yanxiang about her optimism.
The poem is about her optimism takes a beating constantly throughout
her life. She describes how her optimism doesnt always smile and
how it has been worked over with nightsticks but still it never leaves
her side and in the end through everything, it is still there to comfort
her. This was very relevant to me, as before the trip I had lost a large
amount of my optimism before the trip reading the pieces about the
issues with community service, but after seeing the kids and how much
they actually appreciated the help, I found my optimism that was with
me the whole time all along. With this optimism that I had found, the
rest of the trip went very well. We saw and experienced many things
that were new to all of us, including me.
When I got back to Chicago after the trip, it was time for the next
step, reflection. In class, we read and discussed many aspects of the
trip, but one stanza from a poem we read stuck out to me and became
memorable. The piece was written by Boris Novak called Decisions,
and the stanza that means something to me is, Between two books,
choose the dustier one. For me, this line really encapsulates the trip

for me. Instead of going to Rome or Paris for a team soccer trip, we
went to a struggling country in South America to help less fortunate
people. I learned much more from the trip we took, than I would have
learned on a trip to a developed country. I am glad that we as a team
chose the dustier book instead of the shiny new one.
The next step that we covered in class was formatting and
creating an action plan, now that we were back in our home
communities. We were introduced to a large variety of local youth
development groups that focused on development via sport. This was
very fitting as that is the way we assisted all the way in Peru, so it was
refreshing to see the same types of programs back at home. We
formulated our action plans after these presentations with what we
were going to do to help or what was going to change as a result of the
trip we just returned from. This was an interesting experience because
we had seen and learned so much about service work throughout the
semester and we were able to go and apply it to our own communities.
Finally, it was time for the evaluation stage in our long journey.
Looking back at the entire process, I believe it went very well and
much better than I was expecting it to go. I, personally, have learned
an astounding amount of things I will take with me through my entire
life. I have learned how service work affects both sides of the process
in the classroom, along with many cultural details and communicating

skills while on the trip. I am very grateful for the opportunity I was
given and I would recommend this experience to everybody.