Blog #1

For my service learning project I have selected the Cafe on the Vine as my location. Coming from a Catholic high school, service hours are nothing new to me. The experiences of my previous service hours as well as being required to reflect on them certainly has an effect on my perception of working at Cafe on the Vine. I understand how it feels to help other people and that it shouldn't be just going through the motions to fulfill a requirement for school. For the full effect of a service project one must unselfishly give sacrifice their time to help others in need who are much less fortunate than ourselves. This was pounded into my brain at my last school, but that does not necessarily make it true of myself. Being somewhat forced to do service, I could not help perceiving it as a burden to myself. I know how selfish that is, given all the suffering others in the world go through every day. Up until now, I have never had the opportunity to do service that is so directly involved with people who are suffering everyday from poverty. My hope is that this service will force me to see just how blessed I am and that I need to give something back to the community by helping these people who need it. I do not want it to be just going through the motions, I want to really help others as well as help myself to really understand what it means to help them.


When I try to picture the location, I see a kitchen that smells like good food and a lot of nice and caring people that help out there. I assume it will be busy with cooks making the food and others serving it to the people waiting in line. I can picture it being very warm with all the stoves and ovens to mirror the attitudes of those helping out.

The knowledge I already have about this sort of service learning experience comes from a previous experience volunteering in a soup kitchen a very long time ago. I don't remember much, but I had to make a lot of food and bag a lot of sandwiches. It was repetitive and I did not really have much contact with the people I was helping. The volunteers were mostly old people and I was the only child there.

So I guess when I think about the people I assume they will all be kind of grubby looking; some homeless guys off the street that do not have a home or enough money for their own food. I picture the people I typically see when I go to Chicago holding up signs and begging for money. This is all I can picture when I try to think about the people I will be helping at Cafe on the Vine.

Living near Chicago often puts me in contact with a lot of homeless people. It frustrates me to feel so helplessly unable bring aid to all of them. A few years ago while I was sitting in a Starbucks downtown with my friends, a homeless man walked in and approached several tables begging for money. I gave him a couple dollars, despite the warning my dad had given me earlier that day. He told me that a lot of the homeless people want to buy drugs and not food and that I should leave it to the soup kitchens and homeless shelters to help them. Besides I wouldn't have been able to afford my train ticket home if I tried to help ever homeless person I saw. These types of encounters growing up are what connect me to the population I will be serving at Cafe on the Vine.