One of many life lessons so far...

Hello Followers,

After having let the topic for this blog stew with me since Wednesday, I have finally decided to publish it. I had friends look over it and give me some suggestions and I had to look over it and do some thinking about what kind of blog I wanted it to be. I knew what I didn’t want it to be: a whiney, complaining blog about how people are ungrateful, but I didn’t want to deviate too much from how I felt or what the situation was like for me.

To orient yourself, picture me at St. John’s Kicthen, serving food to a long, long line up of people. If you have never been to St. John’s Kitchen, then picture any Community Kitchen that you know. It doesn’t matter what the people look like, how they are dressed, or what situation has brought them there. The main point is that they are there. They are in line to get food, because they are hungry, and they cannot fulfill the basic necessity of having enough food to nourish themselves. This is perhaps what I forgot on Wednesday as my patience began to wear thin.

This is where my BREATHE acronym comes in. Except it didn’t. I was standing there, spoon in hand, ready to food, but not really ready. Only thinking I was ready.

Wednesday morning was possibly THE most stressful experience I’ve had at my placement at St. John’s Kitchen so far. I know I had a rough first day, but first days everywhere are brutal and I thought being this far into my placement that things could only get better and more positive. This theory was proved wrong.

By the end of my three hours there I was almost in tears (yet again) and I couldn’t wait to get out of there. Everyone (mostly patrons) was cranky, rude, upset, yelling, etc. and I was just standing in the middle of it, trying not to let it bring me down. But eventually it did, and that I know is my own fault, but man it is hard when everyone else around you is being a Negative Nancy.

I witnessed a patron of St. John’s have a complete freak out on Wednesday. I mean FREAK OUT. She threw her full food tray at the counter which obviously exploded everywhere and then tried to clean it up but got too upset to clean. She walked away with her half empty tray, food all over and then threw it on the table she sat at to eat her meal. Two minutes later she was back up and demanding more food. You may think that the language I am using (referring to Karsten’s blog) is persuasive, however I have thought long and hard about this blog and about the language I have used since reading Karsten’s blog and I assure you that demanding is what she did. It took everything I had in me NOT to say something to her. I remembered that I don’t know her, or anything about her. I don’t know her life story, what she’s been through or going through. After I saw yet another temper tantrum from her, I am really glad I kept to myself. 

I also witness some of the most selfish behaviour I’ve seen in a long time. I’ve seen 5 year olds act more pleasantly than some of the people at St. John’s Kitchen did on Wednesday. We served chicken fingers  and I guess it was a hit, because one lady came up (I kid you not) TEN TIMES to fill up TWO plates completely with chicken fingers ONLY, nothing else. And boy was she rude when people asked if she wanted anything else on the plates. Some people hadn’t even gotten one plate and she was coming up for more. I feel like this comes from a mentality somewhere within the person saying, “Get more food, or die.” This might be a little bit extreme but I think that for some people it literally is the difference between life and death. For this woman, maybe not so much, but people in general seem to have this need to over-consume, over-hoard, over-indulge and go over the top with some things. People who do not generally always have an overabundance tend to do this when they can, which would account for her lack of respect to those who had not eaten yet. It has become a dog-eat-dog world; an every-person-for-themselves, individualistic-based world.

Now, I know this sounds like a complete complaining fest, which is exactly what I just said was annoying about my placement on Wednesday. But I’m just writing down what the facts of the situations are, and trying to figure out how these actions and situations are justified. My entire morning revolved around serving others, which I understand is the point of this placement; however I did not sign up to be a maid to these people, which is what it ended up feeling like. I was told several times to “Give me that”, or “Give me more, no more, NO MORE”. It gets annoying after a while and it makes me feel like I am babysitting them. These are fully grown people who have the capacity to learn new things yet they refuse to use the oldest tricks in the book, like being polite.

The saying “beggars can’t be choosers” also came into my head, because at one point, a really nice pasta salad had been finished and rice was put in its place. The next ten to fifteen people in line complained and said they didn’t want “that”, they wanted the pasta salad, and when I said, “Well, this is what we’re serving right now”, almost all of them turned up their noses and walked away. I understand that it was a personal decision that made them walk away and decide that they just weren’t hungry enough to eat rice, but I thought to myself long and hard, if I was starving and this was one of my only meals, or whatever for the week that I would be a lot more grateful and eat whatever was given to me. 

I had a conversation with a friend the following day about serving people with dignity. I thought she meant the actual servers themselves, but she was talking about the people receiving the food. She said that it was more than just giving them food on a plastic disposable plate. It was giving them nice ceramic plates, with silverware and cups. A meal with dignity because it wasn’t served on a disposable plate, because it had silverware, because the people who served it to them cared enough to make a meal that was worth eating. The more I thought about this, the more I realized that she was right. It has to be about more than just getting by, and feeding the homeless or the hungry. It has to be about giving them what’s good enough for everyone. Helping out is a nice gesture, but if an individual helps out for personal gain they aren’t going to get anywhere. Perhaps this is the message I lost while struggling through my frustrations and anger the other morning at St. John’s.

I’ve always been told that if I’m not part of the solution, I’m part of the problem. This little saying has given me a new perspective on a lot of situations, and I never cease to learn a life lesson when I repeat it in my head going into a situation. In a way, being at St. John’s is being part of the solution to poverty within Kitchener/Waterloo, but being a negative Nancy and turning against these people in stressful, or hard times is definitely part of the problem. Days later I am able to see this revelation; however it was a difficult task to get where I am in terms of how I feel about this past Wednesday at St. John’s. I feel as though it was a life lesson that had to be learned the hard way, and it never fails that I would choose to learn something the hard way.

I also received some insight into possible future situations that may occur at my placement abroad. Perhaps not the same situation, but the same theme, lack of respect, lack of dignity (on both parts), which will lead me to become frustrated and upset easily (as we can see from this situation). Little life lessons like the one I experienced on Wednesday and throughout the rest of the week have been integral in the making of who I have become, and they also show me a lot about myself in stressful situations (which I will encounter many of in my new country this summer). I am glad that I was able to reflect on the situation and take a second look at it (with the help of  great friends, you know who you are!) and with some deeper insight, believing that there had to be more to the situation than just what had frustrated me. 

Hopefully this lesson will teach me to me more open to the next life lesson that is in store for me. I feel as though the difficulties of this one made me realize that I need to be more open to life lessons, or even simple lessons that are still life changing.

With only three more weeks left at my placement, I am sad to leave because I have gotten to know some of the people, volunteers and patrons so well. Also because I feel as though I have learned a lot at this placement (good, bad, ugly, frustrating, angering, etc.) and that a lot of these lessons couldn’t have been learned without the help of St. John’s Kitchen. So, although I had some mixed feelings about this lesson at the beginning, I feel as though I have been able to accept the challenges that St. John’s has thrown at me, and I’ve become a better person for it. 

Cheers!