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The Goddess Speaks Nancy Arcayna |
Working on community
projects early in life
can be rewardingMy son and I joined 15 other kids on a journey to clean up Wahiawa District Park a few months ago. The students ranged in age from 7 to 13 and were a part of Ho'ala School's Club Kokua program. All had vowed to be "protective environmental agents."
My feeling is that if volunteering begins at an early age, it becomes part of a child's life. If you help at an organization or work toward a cause you feel strongly about, the rewards are boundless. Watching kids who want to improve the community is also a wonderful sight.
Upon arriving at the park, we came face to face with the source of some of the mess: Four boys were creating a shower of trash, tossing it down from the top of a playground structure. The gasps from the school group led to a steely resolve to save the park and save it from those horrible, wretched creatures.
The four boys looked at us like an altogether different creature with three heads as we proceeded to clean up their mess without uttering a word to them. The club leader had explained to the children that we couldn't tell others what to do but that we could model good behavior and hope that they will follow along and learn by example.
Eventually, we invited the litterbugs to join our venture, and they did so willingly. A couple of them even expressed how much fun they were having. By the time the cleanup ended, the four boys had collected a larger bag of trash than the rest of us.
Since then they've become litter-picking regulars, eagerly awaiting our school group's visits to the park. They've become handy in helping us to paint benches, eliminate graffiti, plant flowers and pick up trash. What a transformation!
Hopefully, the experience gave these youngsters a sense of community they were obviously missing. Maybe schools should skip a class once a month and take kids into the neighborhood and show them how they can make a difference. That type of hands-on learning will last a lifetime.
Kids can learn so much from community service. By volunteering they develop a sense of responsibility and what it means to make a commitment. They may even grow to realize that each individual is partly responsible for a community's well-being.
Children can also gain a great sense of self-esteem and belonging by seeing firsthand how one person can make a difference. It is an empowering message that many children do not get while adults focus on more dramatic issues such as crime and drug abuse. But if these kids are taught to care about themselves and others in the community, perhaps that would solve the larger problems as well.
Volunteer leaders have found that helping out can keep kids out of trouble. Doing positive work prevents them from having too much idle time to get into mischief.
During our cleanup session, the school group also received a lesson in tolerance as they welcomed the new youngsters they had discovered trashing the park. Together, they found that even the most diverse individuals could be united by common values.
As a volunteer, maybe you can't change the world, but the ability to make a small difference in someone else's life makes it all worthwhile.
Nancy Arcayna is a feature writer for the Star-Bulletin.
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