The Human Rights Work Done By Mother Teresa

My first time at SERVE 1 Day was on October 12, 2019 at the Festival Beach Community Garden. The second time I served was on October 26, 2019 for the Founder’s Day Service Project at Pease Park. I’ll begin by discussing the Festival Beach service. Festival Beach is a beautiful community garden located in central Austin by the water. I began by clearing out weeds on one of their gates, then continued to trim bushes and trees around the property. Pease Park is a stretch of land also located in central Austin. At Pease Park, we worked to spread soil and then spread mulch around trees. I guess the main two things I learned from these experiences is the value of teamwork and manual labor. Teamwork was crucial as we split up into teams to conquer these tasks which helped us execute in an orderly and timely fashion. I also respect people who do manual labor for a living, because I was exhausted by the end of each of these days. However tired I was, I did feel inspired by the whole experience of both SERVE days. The people in charge seemed extremely grateful for our help and that made me feel like I was making a difference. I love Austin and knowing that I helped make the city even a tiny bit better is inspirational in itself. My SERVE experience also helped me gain some new insight as to how jobs like these get done. I hadn’t realized how crucial community service is to getting tasks like these done. Many parks, companies and services rely on volunteers for work like this, so it is critical that we as a community continue to help when we can.

I would argue that the ideas and concepts we explored in class did not come up during my volunteer service, except for possibly a little bit at the end. See, towards the end of the SERVE 1 days, we had group discussions. We talked about the impact that our work had on the people and places it affected. This only took up a little bit of the time though. Most of the time was spent playing games and doing team activities. While there is nothing wrong with that, I do believe that there could be better integration of service-learning topics into the discussion led at the end. I think to better integrate the ideas into the experience, we could focus our discussion at the end around a few questions that relate to the morality of our experience, and that experience broadened to our city, nation and globe. What I mean by this is discuss questions like, “Do we have a duty to serve our community?”, or, “How does our service affect this city, nation or globe?” Discussion questions like these tackle important questions similar to those we discussed in class and puts context to them by relating them to the service experience we just did.

A few of the topics we discussed in class definitely shed some light on the way I view service learning. One that quickly came to mind is the question we discussed awhile back concerning if we as citizens have a moral obligation to help/conserve our environment. The way I see it, I connect that question with community service. After taking this course, and discussing these topics, I believe everyone is obligated to get out and serve their community in some fashion. It doesn’t necessarily have to relate to the environment (although I do believe we are obligated to serve our environment as well), but it could be anything that positively affects our community.

The Signs of the Times assignment also heavily associates with service learning, especially because my topic for the assignment was environment/climate change, and both of my SERVE 1 Days were to help the environment. One key theme that came across during both my SERVE 1 Days and my Signs of the Times assignment was team work. For example, team work was crucial to get our tasks done at Pease Park and the Festival Beach Community Garden. Team work is also pivotal if we as a community/nation/globe are going to slow climate change and help our planet – that was extremely evident in the articles I read for the Signs of the Times. Not one person or country can fix or reverse what we’ve done to this planet. The only way is if everyone works together and does their part. For citizens that may mean doing community service and driving an electric car, while for a nation that may mean creating new policies. Either way, we all need to do our part.

If I were to lead a service-learning experience, I would break the experience into three parts. First, there would be a pre-volunteering discussion, then we would volunteer, and finally we would have a post-volunteering discussion. I would specifically give the volunteers a few questions to be thinking about as they work. These would be similar to our discussion questions that focused on morality. Then at the end of the experience we would look back on those questions and see what the volunteers came up with – a discussion would be led at the end.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta was a nun and missionary who sought to help people living in poverty as well as people who suffered from sickness. She is considered to be one of the 20th centuries greatest humanitarians. Born in Skopje, now the capital of Macedonia, she moved to India at the age of 18 where she lived for the majority of her life. In 1946, Mother Teresa had what she calls “the call within the call.” She described this as an order to help the poor and live among them. She then began her mission work in 1948. While living in India, she lived with the poor and helped them and eventually in 1949 she was joined by a group of young women in which they made efforts to help the “poorest among the poor” and it was not easy as she not only helped the poor but became one of them. In fact, Mother Teresa has stated that during her first year doing this, she was tempted to return to her old life.

Over the next few years, Mother Teresa helped open centers for the poor and sick including a hospice meant for those suffering from leprosy. She also opened a center meant for homeless orphans and children. These happenings sparked some popularity, and by the 1960’s there were help centers like the ones Mother Teresa started set up throughout India, but Mother Teresa was not done. She then went international and opened up more centers in Italy, Tanzania, Austria, Venezuela, and more countries in Asia, Africa, and Europe.

Unfortunately, following all of her success, around the 1980s, Mother Teresa’s health began to decline. She suffered from a heart attack, and soon after developed Pneumonia which brought on heart problems. In 1996 she broke her collarbone, then had malaria and heart failure. Eventually, in 1997 she passed away and is still praised for the life she led today.

The “See, Judge, Act” method is clearly at work when analyzing Mother Teresa’s life. She began by observing a situation in which she wanted to change. The situation being poverty and sickness across India, and later on internationally. She saw these issues beyond her first impressions. She obviously put a lot of thought into the current situation, enough thought to act upon it. She evaluated the situation based on her moral principles; the principles that guide her to do right and she felt strongly enough about the situation that she knew something must be done. She not only acted through charity, but also justice. Charity in the sense that she was known for providing the sick and poor with things they needed like food and shelter, but she also attacked the issue at its root. She performed justice by opening the help centers for the sick and poor. Her leprosy hospices, and homeless centers were acts of justice.

What struck me most about Mother Teresa was her selflessness and her ability to empathize with the people she was helping. She did this by becoming one of them; living among them. Almost nobody would be willing to actually become homeless to put themselves in somebody else’s shoes, but Mother Teresa did just that. She was a saint, earning the title given to her by the Catholic church.