One of my favorite anecdotes comes from a commencement address offered by David Foster Wallace.
“There are these two young fish swimming along,” said Wallace, “and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning, boys, how’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?’”
As Wallace points out, the meaning of this parable is that oftentimes even the most obvious facts of our reality can often go unnoticed. I had my own, “what the hell is water?” moment during the past few weeks as I tried to understand why I felt uneasy deciding how to represent my past service-work experiences.
My last summer looked a lot like many of yours in that it was service-oriented. With the Student Research Training Program sponsored by the Duke Global Health Institute, I spent two months doing a variety of administrative tasks in Naama, Uganda. The project I have stayed most connected with is COPE, a three-tiered program that provides psychosocial counseling, career counseling and material support to around 40 vulnerable children on a bi-weekly basis for the period of one year. From the onset, I saw the program with outrageous ambition.
But, as I embellished my resume during the past few weeks in preparation for securing a summer internship, I became an expert shape-shifter. I took my past fieldwork experiences and then sliced and diced them until they were a well-polished representation of my skill set that, coincidentally, happened to align perfectly with the skills that your organization deemed necessary! As I applied for more organizations, the people I created the program with seemed to exist a little bit less and less.
This sense of unease grew throughout the semester as I soon realized that I was spending significantly less time answering emails related to COPE than I was spending time talking about it. It was becoming a great tool for promoting myself on paper, but it was not growing as a tool to offer psychosocial services to our target group. The more I told people about COPE for self-advancement, the more it began to hold less of a real place in my heart and the more it became a mask that I could take on or off. My to-do list—updating the site, connecting the counselors with research, registering the organization in the U.S., etc.—sat unchecked. I rationalized my misplaced actions as justifiable on the basis of building my future capabilities, which is the goal of our educational institute, right?
We are all at transient times in our lives. Many of us haven’t spent more than six months in the same city for the past few years. How, then, do we stay connected with service-oriented projects that we build ourselves and avoid using those projects—and the people involved—instrumentally?
This problem is in no way unique to my experience. It’s pervasive across the service culture at Duke, whether it’s creating a club on campus junior year or advocating for an international issue. Often, there exists a disconnect between our own benefits and the success of those causes we promote. This is a problem that has been explored in past dPS columns.
But, if we can bracket, at least momentarily, our skepticism of the totally obvious realities of service work and start seriously asking ourselves “What is water?” instead of merely acknowledging its existence, there are some valuable lessons that we can apply to our experiences. It’s just a question of turning information into agency. When engaging in service-based projects, especially those that involve creating a program or working in an equal partnership with underprivileged people, we need to create a treaty with ourselves to not violate a golden ratio of service. Using one metric, let’s judge our own promotional benefits, both in terms of personal advancement and praise from others. Then, using another, let’s judge a combination of our outputs and the instrumental use of others.
It’s difficult to argue that this ratio should be equal given the transient nature of our experiences and our justifiable need for self-advancement at this stage of our careers. Given this, it’s okay if the personal-gains side of the ratio is two, three or five times greater than the tangible-outputs side.
But, if we take the time to sit down and honestly ask those questions, maybe we’ll see that the ratio of some of our projects is unacceptable. I have certainly participated in service activities on campus where my benefits exceeded the outputs. It might help if we refrained from biting off more than we can chew. If we are thinking about creating a better ratio, we would also probably want to attack problems where we feel there can be real outputs.
Maybe I should not have restructured COPE at all because the intended outputs are beyond my means today. Maybe a more appropriate program would have been one that had more definable and easily accomplished outputs. Perhaps then, if the ratio were a bit better, I would feel a bit more at ease.
Craig Moxley is a Trinity junior. This column is the ninth installment in a semester-long series of weekly columns written by dPS members addressing the importance of social action, as told through personal narratives. You can follow dPS on Twitter @dukePS.
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