Communities within, around, and beyond... well, Communities

This trip has been one of the most empowering, impacting, and eye-opening experiences of my entire college experience. Today's Girl Talk poetry reading and spoken word performance moved me, in heart and in mind, toward unexplored intersections of identity and social expectation. Props to the beautiful women who told their stories, sharing with us their limitless joys and their deepest of sorrows; it was an unforgettable evening. 

Among the more sobering lessons I will take away from tonight, though, is rooted in my penchant for self-criticism, for myself as an individual and the communities within which I identify. Over the past couple of days, we served at Glide, a soup kitchen that practices radical inclusion, and Project Open Hand. Both aim to serve those of the absolute lowest economic standing that could be found in the city by providing nutritious meals, and both are heavily mobilized by the community itself. I got to see how people in a community, regardless of any real experiential connection with each other aside from proximity, take what little they have, and collectively work to provide for each other. It's a beautiful thing. 

When I was about eight years old, I traveled back to Vietnam with my family. I lived there for a month, and my parents made sure I got a chance to see the beauty of our native homeland along with all the poverty and misfortune that coursed through the social fabric of the country.  I'll never forget the Sunday morning my parents took me to a big stone church for mass on top of a hill. To get into the church, we had to walk up a pathway alongside the hill leading up to the church. The dusty yellow pathway was lined with rows of starving homeless people, mostly elderly, with their tired, weather-worn, sun-parched arms outstretched, begging for money or for food from passing parishioners. My parents had told me that I should grow up to be a leader, and in Eastern cultures the understanding of leadership revolves around influence; "Be as the wind, for when the wind blows, the grass bends." I was eight years old, and that thought terrified me because I could see, as I walked past the rows of worn, leathery arms, those tired arms swayed toward me wherever I stepped, like a field of parched, yellow grass bending in the wind.

I knew my life was better and that I was fortunate, but I was naive enough to believe that couldn't be true here. That poverty, that homelessness, that state of placeless helplessness was something that happened over there, on the other side of the world... not here. Right?

That couldn't be more wrong. Walking the streets of the Tenderloin, there were people sleeping on doorsteps, in entrances of business centers, with their entire lives tucked under blankets in shopping carts. Poverty is a reality everywhere, and we're so happily and comfortably blind to the suffering of those nameless, faceless people who sleep on the streets down which we don't even care to travel.

Volunteering at Glide and Project Open Hand was uplifting because I felt as though I knew exactly who I was aiming to help. I could see them in the streets. I could picture them being fed.

I then noted that I was slightly uncomfortable with volunteering at the LGBT Center in San Francisco, especially after being in soup kitchens. They were preparing for an auction with an extensive guest list peppered with local celebrities and affluent community members. The entrance fee was upwards of $90, and the auction within it would have been well out the reach of my college-kid pocketbook, not to mention the food and the drinks. I felt an unease because, for the past two days, I'd been helping to feed people who suffered from AIDS, who were economically disenfranchised, or who lived in the streets. This afternoon, I stuffed name tags for a group of people who own homes, who could blow hundreds of dollars on a fabulous evening out on the town, and who would probably never even dream of having to live from paycheck to paycheck or struggle to feed their children or themselves from day to day.

I had to really challenge myself to accept that sometimes you had to work within the system to affect social change. The Center was a lofty operation, and it is sustained by events like those. The events are catered to the wealthy and the affluent so as to earn their support, their capital, to maintain that space. And the LGBT community needs that space. And that works. And as much as I hate to admit it, the effort was probably worth the trouble. 

And yet, somewhere, in my heart of hearts, I can't help but feel that every name tag I was stuffing was one meal I was not serving. To walk out of the beautiful LGBT center and back over to streets littered with sleeping bags and shopping carts remains highly unsettling.