an old essay that I found
Hillary Lisowksi
Period 5
January 18, 2005
Heads Up
I use to be an extremely materialistic person; all I cared about was what other people thought of outward appearances as well as the front people put up. I never even thought how little people really cared about what I did or how I acted. I didn’t notice that what matters most is how good you feel about yourself. One week last summer changed a lot for me.
I have always been very involved in community service but it never meant anything to me until last summer. The work I did really didn’t make me feel good, and I did not realize what a profound difference I was making in people’s lives. It was two weeks after school had ended and I was getting ready to go on a week long trip to Hartford where my church as well as several other sister churches planned to go into the jaws of the city to clean up Head Start buildings. These buildings were preschools that were sponsored by the city of Hartford to provide safe affordable day care to working families.
The Head Start building that I worked at was a complete mess. The Plexiglas windows had grime so thick that they were like the windows and walls of a cigar bar that had accumulated years of smoke residue although, in this case it was dirt and pollution accumulating on the windows. We literally had to pour bottles of Windex onto them and watch the black liquid slide down them as though they had been painted over to block out the sun. The fences had weeds crawling up them, and the sandbox was not filled with sand but dirt and that too had weeds in it. This disarray was certainly unnerving but looking back on the scene, what upsets me most was that I had spent more time hanging out with friends and pretending to work than I did trying to fix that deplorable situation.
After we completed the improvements at the various sites and the week was coming to the close, I reflected upon what I had done that week I found that the times I enjoyed most had been when I was working. I was aware that what I was doing was making a child’s day brighter, and when I had worked with friends and combined our efforts to a good cause and make a difference in this community.
I came to realize that throughout the week I had wasted my time. I had been given select days to make a difference and I had barely put any work into helping out where it was sorely needed. You should have seen the smiles washing over the preschoolers’ faces as we built planter boxes so they could learn to grow vegetables in them. Even though the kids that seemed scared at first, they held to us like burrs when it was time to leave. All of this did not hit me until afterward and it upsets me greatly because I was numb to the experiences I and my responsibilities.
As we packed I felt like a bad person, suddenly what I looked to other people was nothing in comparison to those few moments when I was making a difference. This moment made me realize that I could still make a difference and feel good about who I was, not what I wore or how I acted. This whole experience has made me realize that if we try to make a difference in the community we can help ourselves as well as others.
I find that interesting
it's really old