Love and Responsibility

Alas, the final semester before graduation day. We all seek to give ourselves to something greater and to build a wholesome community. Now, we are learning how to apply our knowledge and bring positive lasting changes. Tania D. Mitchell, in How Service-Learning Enacts Social Justice Sensemaking laid out social justice sensemaking properties. I believe the first, grounded in identity, is the most important property. Students must define their own core values and beliefs and not of their peers’ to “understand themselves in relationship to the concept of social justice” (Mitchell, p. 4).

The service-learning I hope to spend time with is at Mad River Community Hospital. This semester I started pre-nursing with hopes to get into a nursing program by the end of this year. I am looking forward to it. It won’t be easy, but I believe it is important to have knowledge and experience in both social sciences and natural sciences. There is something unique about helping a sick person, who can’t help themselves and tend to his or her needs that attracts me to the profession of nursing. Though it is a different path from geospatial analysis, community planning, or wildland conservation, I strongly believe my time in the Environmental Studies department has not gone wasted. The way I see it is like this: everyone needs healthcare. No matter if a patient leans left or right on the political spectrum, up or down on religious matters, the main concern of a nurse is to make sure this vulnerable person is alive and well. To me, that is the ultimate form of brotherly love: to care for someone in need when I have the means to do so.

I am optimistic because I know my strengths lie in caring for the sick. Knowing that the change many of us in ENST are striving for takes a long time is humbling. As far as seeing evidence of measurable impacts: when there is confidence in doing the right thing, shortly after humility follows. Love overflows and hope is abundant. Faith is an absolute necessity.