Transformation Unknown

I'm here in St. Louis now at the Marianist Retreat Center for MVP's Orientation Retreat. We finished all our sessions today, and are just about ready to get going. Matt, Molly, Kat, and I are the four international volunteers traveling to Karonga, Malawi, where we will meet up with Sarah Wdowiak and Emily Richardson who have already been there for a year and will be volunteering with the four of us newbies for the next year. The four of us have spent the week with three girls named Heather, Nicole, and Courtney who are the three domestic MVP volunteers working here in St. Louis for this next year. They are really great, and it has been fun getting to know them.

This has been a long week full of sessions focused on preparing us for our volunteer commitments. We've looked at who we are, and where we are coming from. We've explored community, prayer, and the Marianist history and spirituality. As we discussed Marianist history and spirituality, I was once again reaffirmed in my motivation for doing this. The Marianists are all about social transformation through Christ: through Love. This is really what got me into committing these two years to service. I hope to help transform the world---even if only in tiny ways, one individual at a time---through Love.

Now, it's obviously not that easy. To begin with, the issue of culture is going to be a particularly difficult thing to manuver. It is my hope, however, that through this experience, I can better understand and work with people of various cultures and perspectives, and as a result, be more effective in transforming the world. How that is going to happen, I have no idea. But it is my hope, and that is what I'm going to follow.

Two sessions this week proved particularly challenging: the session on cultural competence and the session on conflict and communication.

I knew conflict and communication was going to be a challenging aspect of this experience. Living in an intentional community is not easy. In many ways, it's much like a marriage, and as the world's divorce rate attests, conflict and failure to communicate can shatter even the greatest of commitments.

However, I did not expect to be presented with such a challenge in terms of cultural competency. I've lived a life where I've been exposed to and immersed in many different cultures. I've read books and taken classes on cultural issues and solutions. I try very hard to be open and accepting of all people, and I truly believe that I at least recognize the value and dignity of each human person (living that out is much more difficult than recognizing it, and unfortunately, I can't honestly say I live out respect for the value and dignity of every person with whom I interact.). But one of the things Patricia Mejia, our presenter on the cultural aspect of volunteering, challenged us to explore was the idea of privilege. I thought I had privilege all figured out. I took a class called Racial and Ethnic Minorities in which I reflected on and analyzed the concept of white privilege. But all that was done very academically. Though I put a lot of effort into bringing my lessons home, I was still able to separate the injustices I read about from the injustices I lived. Patricia made these injustices even more real to me when she drew our attention to the fact that by choosing to volunteer, we are already assuming that we have something better to offer the people we are serving. By making this decision to go to Malawi, I am claiming that I have some sort of superior knowledge or understanding or gift to offer the people there. By western standards, perhaps I do. But I have a feeling that I am going to be one who is transformed and made better, not them. So does this make this whole commitment a bit selfish?