Personal Narrative: My Service Experience With The Poor

The service that I did with the poor was at St. Vincent De Paul. I took the bus with a friend after school on a random Thursday with Ms. Reuter driving the bus, which I didn’t expect her to know how to do at all. It was my first time working there, because I had only worked at the distribution center the year before for confirmation. When we arrived we all signed in and they put the people who had been there before in their normal locations. My friend and I got split up, with me in charge of sorting all of the donated canned foods and my friend went over to move pallets around. While I was working with one of the staff there, I made friends with some freshmen that were also working with me. They started calling me silly names like “broth boy” because at some point I got in charge of sorting canned broths. Some things that I learned from this service experience was that I should never go into anything with expectations. When I decided to go that afternoon, I was really bummed because I don’t really like service hours and I didn’t want to go on a long and boring service event. However, the positive personalities of all the people working there perked
While I was working at St. Vincent de Paul, one of the staff came by and asked me how I was doing on my current job. I replied, “Well I think I’m almost done.” and the staff member just laughed heartily and replied, “We’re never really almost done”. As I look back on his words now, I really understand what he was trying to convey. Service to the poor is not just some mandatory assignment that we as students do and can just be done with and move on. It is really important to continue to strive to work for the people in our communities who really need it more than anybody else, and there will always be people in the world who are in