"The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others."

By: Sathvika Ramachandran
Yesterday, in the car ride home from the immunization drive, I was hit with this sort of uncomfortable awareness that in the past few weeks of interning, I haven’t yet had the quintessential, social justice-y college student’s realization of “wow, I’m so privileged compared to the people that I serve.” I couldn’t quite figure out how I’ve become so unphased by the refugees, SLI students and the massive disparity between both our circumstances. Instances then started popping up in my head of my inherent impassiveness. In my time at Los Arcos, I spend way more time making the little kids to pick up after their own selves rather than wasting even a second cleaning up after them.

This past Tuesday, one of my SLI students, Jose, couldn’t spit even a simple sentence of English out. I refused to talk to him in Spanish. Instead, I made him go through a laborious process-- I made him do the whole assignment with me in English, then I made him translate the English sentences he created to Spanish, and then I made him read the Spanish sentences out loud in English.

On career day, a little girl from Nigeria acted as our guide and led Alexis and me to different classrooms so we could speak to students about planning for the future. Before we entered one classroom, the girl excitedly pointed at the door and said that this was her class. I asked her if she liked the class, the subject, and the teacher, and she nodded her head to everything. She then told me, “I get made fun of though…”

I asked her, “Why?”

She said, “They make fun of me whenever I answer questions. They make fun of me because I’m black. They don’t like it when I answer questions.”

I told her bluntly, “Haha, that’s stupid. Just answer the questions anyway.” And then I walked into the class to speak.

Only now as I type this, I realize that this was my first encounter with a black child battling racism.

I’m not impassive.

The kids at Los Arcos keep banging on the door and beg us to play, even after we have to physically pick them up and put them outside so they can go home. They all tug at my shirt and pull on my hair, asking me to teach them new clapping games and to listen to their silly stories, worries, and dreams.

When we finished the assignment, Jose grinned and fist bumped into the air. Thirty minutes later, I was walking through the cafeteria to get to the main office, and I saw him in the lunch line. He stopped joking with his clique, stepped out of the line, and came over to hug me.

The little girl from Nigeria told me, “Yes I know. I always work hard.” She smiled, and then proudly opened the door to her classroom for Alexis and me.

I haven’t forgotten the big picture, but I’ve become lost in the details. Instead of being occupied with numbers, statistics, and circumstances, right now, I am fixated on their humanness. And this is why the vast, obvious differences between them and myself has become negligible. I’ve drowned over and over in my own immense love for them, and as a result, I’ve found such peace and happiness. I’m losing myself in helping them, but I’m finding everything that reminds me what it means to be human.