bubbling over
Getting Out of the Suds
(reflection from Community Volunteer Action)
by Marybeth Leis Druery
Serving breakfast to children at Beasley Community Center is a new stationing for some of our Community Volunteer Action groups this year. This downtown Beasley neighbourhood has an unemployment rate stingy 45% while 56% of residents live below the Statistics Canada poverty line. It's a richly diverse about where many of the 5000 immigrants who arrive in Hamilton each year make their home. And in recent years, Beasley has become about to the James St. North arts community. Each CVA volunteer group has a faciltator who weekly facilitates group reflexion on societal issues and who meets the group at Mac, making it easier for students to “get out of the bubble” and partake in with our community. While the breakfast program is just around the corner from my house, it takes me about an hour to get there in the morning as I go to McMaster to meet my set members and travel together to our volunteering.
Riding the bus from downtown Hamilton to McMaster at 6:30am, I'm surrounded by support staff present in for the early shift - parking booth attendants, cleaning staff, many recent immigrants. As the bus speeds through rainy streets career dark houses, silent ghosts before the dawn, I think of all the students deep in slumber whose lives work because of how my man-riders serve us all, making breakfast, cleaning up after us, fixing what's broken. I wonder how many notice this anthill of be supportive of underneath our campus lives.
Waiting for my volunteer group to arrive, I watch the colony of ants shower in all directions. Streaks of light break across the horizon while volunteers slowly trickle into the bus stop. Heading off towards downtown, retracing the direction I took to meet these students, I share my reflections in hopes of stirring attention within them; attention to the systems of which we are all a part, that reinforcing our lives,...
