How my service changed my life

Author: Charles Witosky

Whenever I get in conversation about my AmeriCorps/ArtistCorps service, I sound like a recruiter, or more descriptive, a proselytizer. My service changed me in a profound way that will be hard to ever replicate. Throughout the past year I had the opportunity to meet students who exposed me to a side of a city and a world that I had barely been exposed to before.

When I was young, about the age of the students that I instructed, I had the opportunity to live abroad. Though as much as that expanded my horizons, I was still insulated in a very upper-middle-class life. Not just in the way that I lived, but also in what I saw. I saw culture, sure, but I never saw poverty. It was hidden from me and it scared me. I didn’t understand it. As I aged, I of course became less averse to running into homeless people or people outside of my (parents’) tax bracket. But still, I never was exposed to it for any amount of time. 

That changed this past year. During my year of service, I not only instructed at-risk, low-income children but I also had the opportunity to listen to them. I listened to their stories about where they came from and what makes their lives different from mine. Sometimes it was directly, by way of children speaking to me one-on-one about what was going on in their lives. Other times it was through casual comments (I’m moving to a new shelter today). In both cases I heard stories heartbreaking, uplifting, and hilarious. And the hilarious part of that sentence is the most important part. Because when I say that I was exposed to stories told by low-income kids, it’s important to note that very rarely were they sad stories, and almost never were they framed as sad stories. 

My favorite example of that is from near the end of my service when I was having the children write stories that we would turn into short films. One student, a particularly precocious one, pitched a story about repeatedly being robbed. Robbed of his bike, his shoes, his chips and candy. What a horrifying story, I thought. But it was not horrifying to him and certainly not to his classmates. Because whether or not it was completely true, there was truth in it to them that they all found to be sidesplittingly hilarious. His fellow students loved it, riffed on it, and added to it.  

This story and the way that he told it was something that I never would have come up with, simply because I’ve never experienced anything close to that in my life. That story and so many others opened my proverbial eyes to a side of life that, had I not entered AmeriCorps, I would have never encountered. My service has undoubtedly made me a more empathetic person, full stop. And for that, long in the future, when I can’t remember all the details from this past year, the feelings and emotions will remain, and I will still have my service illuminating a part of me.