One Basket to Another
Emma Reichert
On Thursday, November 10th, I had the opportunity to deliver meals to members of the Park Slope Center for Successful Aging. I delivered meals to two elderly women who could no longer travel to the community center. The woman I volunteered with, Susan, is an avid center member. She loves going on daily walks and staying busy with multiple extracurriculars; naturally, we got along well.
Our first stop was Janice Messinger, who broke her shoulder and is deaf, inhibiting her from being able to leave her apartment. The meals we deliver feed her for the week.
Every person has a basket; Your basket is filled with the contents of your life. If you could swap your basket, would you? Susan and I spoke about this after visiting Janice. She talked about how when she was younger. She wished she had other people's lives. However, different people have varying issues, and life has taught her that her basket is quite nice compared to what it could be. She spoke of how her basket sometimes gets heavy. However, you don’t know the weight of another’s until you hold it. Susan did not want Janice’s basket.
This connects to the article “Community Service Learning in the Face of Globalization,” which details the ‘Time-Space Compression.’ An aspect of this ideology is how “People become not individuals but many as, through interaction between their own and others’ subjective understandings and experiences of the world, they discover new and marginalized parts of themselves and so create multiple selves, in relation to different communities.”(Keith) Development and individuality are reliant on learning, and the most valuable lessons come from others' experiences. Each person's basket of experiences has a story that can enrich others' emerging identities.
It is rare that I genuinely converse with people over the age of 60, making this experience especially interesting. Ultimately, this delivered me a better understanding of what I have. When interacting with others, especially those who are elderly, the world opens up to privilege, experience, and suffering. “As people must find who and what they are through dialogue with others, the need for connectedness increases, supporting emerging identities on the basis of the struggle against particular modes of oppression that target race, sexual preference, gender, and the like.”(Keith) Getting engaged with an outside demographic from my own gave me the revelation of invisible suffering. When you think of the elderly, crippled and unable to live a fulfilling life due to disabilities is not something that comes to mind; however, it is the most prevalent realization to come out of delivering the meals. The elderly are a large demographic commonly forgotten, stuck with poverty and incapability due to age.
This group has, in some cases, run out of retirement funds, become crippled due to an unfixable injury, and is riddled with issues associated with aging. How do you empower an invisible demographic? Fixing this issue could be resolved with more “successful aging centers”; however, what happens when members are too old or disabled to attend the centers?
Many cultures value caring for seniors as they age, and others from privileged backgrounds can live in an assisted living facility. But what about those in the middle who don’t have these resources? No communication and unable to care for themselves; what happens? Visibility is a significant aspect in combating social issues, resulting in struggles with the geriatric community being forgotten.
Overall, this service project brought to light an underlying societal issue with no real solution. Weekly meal delivery is a solution to hunger, but it is not a resolution to the more significant problem at hand, a population imprisoned by their physical abilities. Participating in this service project made me aware of an issue I had never thought about or known about, making this experience especially engaging.
References
Zett Keith, N. (2017). Cultivating practitioners of Democratic civic engagement. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 23(1). https://doi.org/10.3998/mjcsloa.3239521.0023.102