So
the journey begins. $33,000 in student loans, a college diploma, and a somewhat
vague but ambitious hope to make the world a better place. So far I have
secured what I hope to be a job that will get me on track for that. Starting in
July I will be working for a foundation in Portland that will build me up for
nonprofit leadership.
A
soon to be 22 year old female immigrant hoping to make the world a better place
in a city full of tree-hugging-coffee-drinking-dread-happy-beer-brewing-tatted-putabirdonit-90s-drifting-hippies.
Seems pretty easy right? A city full of recycling caffeinated (or slightly
drunk) colorful hippies... how hard can making a difference be?
At
this point I am wondering what exactly gave me the right to think that I can
actually make a difference. Maybe I've spent too many afternoons drinking
French press coffees at my favorite spot in town thinking about life. But
really... what exactly did I get for my $33,000 I will have to pay back in 10
years? I can tell you one thing- I didn't get a job that pays me $33,000. It's
not all the lectures, projects, assignments and presentations that I
will look back on every time I make a loan payment. I look back on my four
years and think about making friends with a 63 year old recovering alcoholic
who taught me about the power of the holy spirit, and sharing meals with a
middle-aged homosexual man who is HIV positive in the basement of an old church
talking about life and taking a 17 year old Iranian refugee girl shopping for
winter clothes while answering questions about why American music is tasteless
and non-violent protests in Portland is not something she should be afraid of.
And I think about how I would never have climbed to the top of Mount Adams and
witnessed the vastness of God's beauty in the midst of one of the scariest
storms I've seen and I definitely would not gotten proposed to twice while stranded
alone in an Ethiopian airport. None of this would have happened if I was not
enrolled full time in an accredited higher education institution for four
years. Maybe four years ago if you told me this is what $33,000 would have
bought me... I would have laughed and said you were crazy. Now I look back and
think... "is that all it cost me?"
It
might have been an expensive way to live for four years if all I have to show
society is a couple of boxes, a fish who I call Dusty Cheater (because
he looks like dust and cheated me out of the goldfish I really wanted), a beat
up 2002 Mazda, and a piece of paper saying something fancy about all of my hard
work. But I could care less about what society has to say because since when
has it been a good measure for anything?
My
last post was about the importance of Ubuntu. You cannot find that word or
concept in any textbook or lecture or assignment I have done over the past four
years. I have never heard a professor utter those words, but I have heard a
dear friend of mine who is our campus pastor speak about Ubuntu in front of a
group of college students (something I am sure was foreign to them). It
was a term I was familiar with because it was something I've witnessed all around
the world – but a concept very foreign to my neighborhood. My diploma is not a
testimony of my heart and the life I have lived over the past few years and it
is not a road map of my future. It is a piece of paper that says to society I am
worthy of hire.
I
may be textbook ready for the world - but I have also learned that we are who
we are through other people. And I am dedicating my vocation to just that.
i
am because you are.
