Mennonite Central Committee

Thoughts on Service

by Dora-Marie Goulet

While I sorted clothes at the women's shelter, Nelly Furtado's voice would float out of the radio, "I'm like a bird, I'll only fly away, I don't know where my soul is, I don't know where my home is." Homesick myself, and working with women who had no home beyond an institutional shelter, that cheesy song stayed in my head all the time.

I spent four afternoons a week for eight months working at that shelter. I was awed by girls younger than myself dealing with the responsibility of motherhood. I met women who would live the rest of their lives in the shelter because they struggled with mental illnesses like schizophrenia. I faced for the first time my own history of privilege as I tried to serve women with lives so different from my own. I began to see the weaknesses in institutions.

I learned that life is unfair, and people, no matter how good their intentions, are imperfect. I also saw that miracles can still happen through those flawed people's flawed actions.

Unlike the homeless bird described in the song, the women who lived and worked at the shelter were not flying from their problems, but living with them, and sometimes despite them. They taught me more about humanity and about life than I learned through all of high school. It is those same life lessons which continue to guide me as I finish university and consider the future.