Voices

…or rather, the first few weeks are the hardest? Who would have thought, right? The infamous ‘syllabus week,’ or opening week when your classes feel more like a get-to-know-you than actual work, completely eluded me this year. I somehow found myself bogged down within the first few days.

I think that one of the best benefits of Lafayette is that we, as students, have the ability to get involved in so many different capacities on campus, which also contributes to my overly packed schedule. While sometimes I feel that my life is overtaken by Zimbra (our campus email service) and that I have to schedule in time for my schoolwork, I think that keeping yourself busy on campus is the best preparation for the world after college. One of my extra curricular activities that has changed me as a person and as a citizen of the world has been my position as a community service coordinator through the Landis Center.

Before I left to study abroad, I coordinated the Safe Harbor program that visits the residents of the local transitional homeless shelter and encourages students to build relationships with the residents to break down stereotypes held by both sides of the other. When I left on my adventures, I passed the program onto the current coordinator and upon my return I have acquired a new program, Meals at Third Street. This program similarly works with hunger and homelessness, but specifically with the women and children population of Easton. As a group, we visit the shelter once a week and cook meals for the women and children who stay at Third Street Alliance.

Ryan O'Sullivan, Evan Gooberman, Tatiana Logan, Chandler Cornwell, Greg Baldwin and myself...knitting away in preparation for Chase the Chill! (@ the Easton Area Community Center) - photo cred to Matt McKenzie

Even though the focus of our individual service is small, the Landis Center aims to ‘create a just society.’ As coordinator, I must live by standards of active citizenship and stand up for what I believe to be right and just while helping my volunteers to find their own definitions of these constructs and similarly display congruent actions. I think that college and life in general is about finding this place of congruence between what we say and what we do. Often we hear that in life, we should leave the places we have visited better than they were when we arrived. I hope to be doing that both with Lafayette and with all of the other communities that I touch along the way.

During our Landis Retreat in the opening week of class, where all the coordinators come together to collaborate on new ideas for our programs and refresh our leadership skills in education, reflection and direct service, we spent half of a day engaged in a community project called ‘Chase the Chill.’ For Chase the Chill, community members knit scarves and pick a day to ‘yarn bomb’ a neighborhood, leaving the scarves for people who might be walking by and need one. It was a great model for how we wish to run our programs as those of us who know how to stitch taught those who didn’t and together we were able to make over 50 scarves that day to put up around a South Side community.

One of the fleece scarves hung up on a sign in the South Side - photo cred to Matt McKenzie

Service is about a continual exchange: an exchange of respect, knowledge, kindness, perspective and ideas. I think these same concepts can be applied to life at college. We are here to learn from each other, creating a mutual understanding of difference and acceptance that we extend beyond ourselves as a platform for knowledge and growth. As the Lafayette community continues to embark on conversations about justice and unity on this campus, the prospect of Greek Life continuity and the legitimacy of our goals and mission, I hope that we can all employ similar skills.