By CHRISTINA FORAND
Staff Writer
 

Volunteers have been known to fall into the pattern of leaving the place where they volunteer for a few hours and not thinking about it again until they arrive for the next three hours. They can get lost in altruistic thinking and not stop to realize how much they are learning from their time volunteering.

Community service can provide opportunities for learning and for forming relationships with people and learning from them, just as one might in any other relationship in your life. It is about learning how local and global communities work, and about the systems that damage and improve the quality of life for human beings.

In community service it is essential to think of long-range goals. Community service without political activism is hypocritical. We should all be working toward a time when community service is not necessary, when there is no need for soup kitchens or shelters or rape crisis hotlines.

It is also imperative to live with the service, to reflect on it, to place it in many different contexts, to engage with it intellectually, emotionally, politically, artistically.

This is one of the main reasons why the Community Service House (Nash House) exists this year. Our main goals for this year are to be a resource for members of the Bates Community, to become more involved with the Lewiston-Auburn community, and to reflect creatively on issues surrounding community service and activism.

So far this year we have each continued our own individual community service which ranges from volunteering with victims of AIDS, to foreign language tutoring in the Lewiston elementary schools, to planning Hunger Awareness Week as well as taking on a group project.

For our group project, we formed a partnership with Martel Elementary School. Each member of the house spends at least a couple of hours a week helping out in the classrooms and on the playground. We have circulated flyers and have had tables outside of Commons to provide information regarding other opportunities for community service in the L/A area.

As far as the reflection component of our house, we are holding a series of Sunday night discussions upstairs in Chase that will be based on community service and activism issues. The topic will be posted in the daily each week and all are encouraged to come. There will be a newsletter sent out at the end of this month that will include upcoming events and opportunities as well as a segment on what the various campus organizations have been planning for this year.

As a campus we have seen the powerful effects of coalition building this year. As a house we are hoping for a similar united effort on campus to engage students in community service and reflection on that service.

We are located at 227 College St. for those of you who don't know how to find us. If you would like to subscribe to our e-mail list, send a message to majorodomo and write "subscribe CSH" as the body of the message.