It was a summer of life changing experiences.
The two months I spent volunteering with several inner city and street missions in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada left me forever changed.
I had no idea that spending a summer in the heart and core of my city would be like entering a whole new culture. Like the experience of traveling to a foreign country often changes us, so did my experience in the inner city change me.
Vancouver on the surface may not look like it has a need for the many soup kitchens and inner city missions organizations that do exist here.
On the surface, this city is a tourist magnet, attracting enough people to make tourism the second largest industry in the province of BC, second only to forestry.
We quickly discovered that everything was painted over nicely to shield out the poverty and pain buried beneath the walls of Native Housing units, illegal basement and garage suites, welfare hotels, and single decrepit homes.
Vancouver's downtown east side has the poorest postal code of any community in Canada and houses the highest HIV infection rate for any single block in the world. The downtown east side is a magnet for crime, drug trafficking, prostitution and life-robbing addictions.
It was the people in this area we focused on serving.
Throughout the summer, we worked alongside other urban ministries in Vancouver. There wasn't such thing as a typical day and any given day would find us coaching inner city kids in soccer or basketball, serving food, groceries and clothing to the homeless, giving an abused child a hug or having a conversation with a homeless person.
Over the course of eight weeks, we developed many relationships with people as we served them at the different sites.
I came to the city this summer seeking the sensational, thinking I would come back armed with stories and situations that would satisfy my own and society's obsession with the outrageous, unbelievable, emotionally hyped scenarios.
Instead, I realized that sensationalism is actually seeing a situation in a "this could never happen to me" attitude and reporting stories as if the players in the situation were outsiders living life in a totally separate and inferior world than our own.
I realized I sought the sensational allure because I had subtle barriers keeping me from seeing the poor, homeless, and prostitutes as people -- people who are really a part of my community, my society and world... people who God gave me the incredible opportunity and privilege to build friendships with and to serve them with God's love in us moving us to action. God broke these barriers in me gradually and deeply through this experience.
How can any situation be made sensational when someone whose sensational, unbelievable sad story is their personal struggle and is the reality they face each morning?
There is a new sense of gravity and severity in my attitude toward my friends in the inner city. It is the gravity of understanding that all the lives we interacted with are precious, God-created, unique people.
I came to the city hoping that I would bless, change and better people's lives. I realized that the most pressing change had to first take place in my own heart and life.
Shermeen graduated from Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, BC Canada in Kinesiology. She is now studying medicine at Macmaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Read her life story on iamnext. Used with permission of the author.
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