Service means feeling at home anywhere
Miguel Vieyra
For a More Just and Humane World
A phone call, and my father was on his way — carrying me home half asleep in his arms simply because I was homesick after just a few hours. As a child, I never could spend the whole night at a friend's house. I needed to sleep in my own bed, in my own room, to wake up to the same view from my own window: swaying maple trees and my mother's garden.
Ask me what home is and I would rattle off a litany of memories: the smell of a Kansas autumn, playing baseball after dark snow on Christmas morning in 1987. And always, home felt the same. During the past year, the view from my window has changed. Last summer, I could see the rusting bend of tracks as the elevated train rattled through my neighborhood in Chicago. Today, I woke up to the Dome channeling the risen sun through 1,000 snowflakes falling on slanted sidewalks.
I have called both these places home, and yet the opportunity to serve them has been my opportunity to be homesick, to watch the view from my window change and to make my home in someone else's home. The act of service, too, is always a homecoming.
Last summer, I worked at Casa Juan Diego, a youth center serving an immigrant community in Chicago's inner city. Clearly, I looked and felt like a stranger. I was in an unfamiliar city, stumbling over Spanish words as I chatted with 6-year-old summer campers, too clumsy to play soccer even with these kids half my size. There I was — 20-years old, two years of expensive private college education behind me and I'm back in third grade being the last guy picked for kickball.
We went on field trips, read books, played basketball, but no matter what activities I tried, I never felt I could reach my kids. There was nothing I could do, it seemed, because I always felt like a stranger, an outsider. And so I was to my kids, a stranger. Perhaps, it is just a feeling that unnerves you the way a packed suitcase might — some things you just need to unpack right away. But while we did not share a common heritage, lifestyle or even a common language, we did share a home.
Finally I realized that service is not so much about what you do, it is where you are. While my soccer game and my Spanish eventually improved, I learned that my most important job in Pilsen was just living there. The act of being present for others necessarily begins with sharing a home. Last summer, I became an immigrant. And I became a child. My kids learned to trust me, because I chose not to be an outsider anymore. We began to live in between the distance that once separated my culture from theirs.
Service is a form of travel. We make camp in those places — many places — where we feel strangest, if only because we're weary. Indeed, service is that restlessness we feel until we build a home where we are weary and wake up to new views through different windows. And being homesick, sometimes, is not a longing for the home we clung to as children, but for the one to which we are called to serve, no matter how foreign.
Since returning to campus in January, I have not returned to Pilsen. Perhaps, I still live somewhere in between. And I still call my father, even late at night. Right now, I can honestly say I'm feeling homesick. It is a blessing never to feel at home in just one place. The Congregation of the Holy Cross takes this as its mission: "Our broader experience allows both the appreciation and the critique of every culture and the disclosure that no culture of this world can be our abiding home." Yet wherever you serve, you are home.
"For a More Just and Humane World" is the Center for Social Concerns' bi-weekly column in The Observer. Miguel Vieyra is a junior at Notre Dame. He is one of four students who participated this past summer in the Hispanic Leadership Intern program, a summer service learning program run through the CSC, in collaboration with partners in Chicago and San Diego. More information on this program, and other similar programs, are available at the CSC. Contact the CSC at ray.11@nd.edu.
The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.
All Viewpoint Stories for Wednesday, February 6, 2002
