My Story/high-school

My Story - David

David - Student Leader
Wyndmere High School

 

From my earliest memories, I have loved learning. I have always loved contemplating all ideas and issues, no matter how insignificant. I've spent many hours weighing the pros and cons of both sides and trying to understand the reasons behind each. Because of this love of learning, I have for a long time had a tendency toward hesitation of action, lest I think on it more and decide in a few moments' time that I really didn't want to do that particular activity in the first place, or learn some new facet of the situation and end in the same: no action. However, in the past several years, I have come to appreciate how the act of doing nothing may prove the most destructive.

The experience that perhaps exposed me most to this moral hazard was a Pay It Forward bus Tour sponsored by the Students Today Leaders Forever organization (STLF). My bus left from Wahpeton, North Dakota, and ended in Chicago, Illinois. Our group stopped and volunteered in three communities along the way: Rochester, Minnesota; Madison, Wisconsin; and Evanston, Illinois. I left on a Wednesday after school and returned late the following Sunday. That was my experience on paper; but in reality, it was much, much more.

A New Perspective on Life and the World.

Living on a bus for five days with thirty-odd strangers my own age challenged me into a new way of being. Aside from my mother (a chaperon), none were yet accustomed to me or to my habits and tendencies. Since people often have an affinity to the foreign, I was naturally queried from the moment of boarding the bus; my new companions sought to gauge what sort of person they would be spending the next five days with. Carrying little of the baggage that comes from histories of past experiences together, I found myself at somewhat more liberty to verbalize and externalize my thoughts and beliefs than I would have at home -- a feeling of liberty, I have since learned, that is more frequently reserved for the college years, and which I am very much fortunate for experiencing four years prior to that time.

During the Tour I was exposed, for the first time, to the stories of real people in the present time who live in a state of perpetual privation that is not of their own doing. In my history and literature classes, certainly, we had discussed similar levels of poverty for peoples in decades past, but the air of these discussions, I now realized, seemed removed in some way from the safe, homogeneous culture of my up-bringing. On the Tour, there was no room for such veils to reality. Seeing photographs of and packaging food for Haitian children in the thralls of poverty was a great eye-opener for me; I had largely assumed, up until that point, that something had already been done "to cure" starvation of such a great magnitude, or that it was deserved in some perverse manner out of personal fault. I was ignorant and wrong, and proven so during the Pay It Forward by experiences helping in assisted living homes, food banks, and other equally vital charities.

At a Minnesota regional food bank in Rochester, it was impressed upon me the enormity of the demand for food near to my own home. Having lived a somewhat sheltered life, I was shocked that a great number of families living in close proximity to me were reliant on food pantries for a sizable portion of their subsistence.

In Madison, we volunteered at a nursing home. This was perhaps my favorite stop. My group descended to the basement, into the Alzheimers Ward. We played bingo with the residents, painted pumpkins, and constructed glittered, foam snowflakes. A gray-haired Alzheimers patient smiled as she gazed up at me from her wheelchair, insisting, even though it was time for me to leave, that I accept her bingo winnings (a chocolate bar) as a token of her gratitude. I shall never forget the appreciation she had for me, nor the lesson that little gestures of kindness really do matter.

My Commitment to Action at Home.

I arrived home from the Tour more acutely attuned to privations of fate -- not only abroad, but also in my home community. I have since been a school representative for the first Richland/Wilkin county-wide food drive, and I have helped organize various smaller food drives and emergency fundraisers through my high school. My school's administration has also warmed to the spirit of Pay It Forward, and is very supportive of mine and other students' efforts to do good in these small, but deeply meaningful ways. For instance, last spring my school administration offered to cancel classes for a day and take students to Fargo in order to sandbag during our worst flood on record. The high school was vacated that day, as students and several members of staff filled sandbags from early morning until late afternoon. This fall, a small group of students and I cooked an Appreciation Dinner for my school's cooks, custodians, secretary, and grounds-keeper. They were very appreciative.  

Shortly after returning home, I became a volunteer First Responder with my community's ambulance service. I continued training and became a certified Emergency Medical Technician (EMT-B) this past June. I volunteer my time with the ambulance for roughly fourteen days each month, eight hours a day. Because I live in a small community, there is not a medical emergency every day, but I know that what little I can do as a medical technician is greatly appreciated by those in need -- and by their families. 

For all this, I am on a much-different path to that which I was on only a few years ago. I have become a much more active member of my society, and I've learned that, although it's wise to think things through, action is needed if I want the world to become a better place in which to live. I will remember this and the ripple analogy of Pay It Forward, and will continue to contribute good to the world, no matter where fate may lead me.

 

---

View and Read More Recent Story Posts!