Community Engagement
Posted on November 8, 2018
I’ve always had a passion for service. I loved to do things for others and for the environment. I especially enjoyed being inspired to do something most people thought I couldn’t do. I first realized this in Grade 1, where my teacher read us a book about earth day. I was pretty inspired by the idea of cleaning up in order to keep the environment clean, so I brought bags to school and asked others to put their plastic bags in them so that they could be reused instead of being put into the environment.
In my final year of PYP, I had to complete the project that was the culmination of all I had learned: PYP Exhibition. First of all, we had to pick two categories that we were especially passionate about. We had to choose between things such as environment, humanities, dance, writing, etc. Since I had an early passion for service and the environment, I chose environment and humanities. We had a hard time getting started at the beginning until we thought of the idea of water. I ended up building a water filter and taking it to a local school who often had problems with water.
Both of those projects were successful, however, they didn’t really continue after I left the grade or the school. I started to focus on other service groups, like the school’s feminist group. I started focusing more on other things and less on service, so eventually, my service involvement hit close to the minimum.
When I moved, I waited about two weeks before my mom suggested I start looking into service groups. I wasn’t particularly involved in any of them until I came across Rooftop Garden. My homeroom teacher had a picture of the garden in her classroom, and I asked her about it. I was intrigued by the idea of gardening. I hadn’t really considered learning how to garden, so I signed up for its Tuesday ECA. When I went up, I didn’t just see a bunch of plants, I saw a community of people who all love gardening, sustainability and the color green. I started looking forward to going up and eventually started to join the community. I faithfully went almost every Tuesday for a year. I learned how to maintain plants, how to plant them, how to harvest them, how to sell them, etc.
I used to live in Bangladesh, which meant I did not see a lot of green. I mostly saw buildings and was quite aware of the fact that I had rarely gotten to see nature. However, I remembered that when I was younger, my dad had a garden on the roof of his factory, which was a tannery. I used to go there often, whenever I got tired of the smell of leather and chemicals. I remembered how much I enjoyed picking limes and mangoes off the trees and eating them for lunch, but never actually understood how they were grown and why. Looking back on it, I think that maybe that’s why I was interested in Rooftop: because of the good memories I had attached to gardens.
After about a year, I met with the leaders of Rooftop Garden. They had seen my work the entire year and offered me a leadership position. I initially wanted to refuse, because I was worried that I wouldn’t garden because I wanted to, but because I might feel like I have to. However, my mom sat down and talked to me when I decided that I was going to refuse. She asked me why, and she told me, “I actually felt the same way about becoming a teacher and having kids. I kept saying it was because I was worried my feelings would change, but it was really because I was scared of the expectations and what would happen if I didn’t meet them.” Thinking about it, I realized that she was right. I was scared. That night, Jasmine and Juliet emailed me asking if I could man the Rooftop booth at the service fair. They told me that it would show me what leadership looked like, and it would reflect well on me in the eyes of the supervisors.
I decided to do the fair. I set up a booth on my own. I wasn’t very well prepared; I had no idea they needed to fill out a booklet of service they were interested in. I listened to what others said, I asked a few people and managed to correctly answer the questions on the booklet. The fair was only recommending service groups, but some people actually signed up on the spot. This taught me something I had never really learned: I didn’t need to be entirely prepared for something to do well at it. I had constantly struggled with that, the uncertainty of not knowing, but I thought back to what my mom said and realized what that meant for me. The leadership members were shocked that I had done so well and invited me to the leadership meeting.
Today, I am a student leader of Rooftop Garden. I am the only one not in Y12, so I need to be the innovative one, the fresh blood of the group. As of now, I have started to plan an event for elementary students: to show them the garden, organize activities, and show them the importance of sustainability and health. In today’s world, one thinks about the world in a passive way. We know we’re digging a bottomless hole. Getting people to connect with nature makes them understand that at this rate, we are digging our graves rather than a hole, and that needs to change. In my proposal, I said it was because we need to engage younger students, upon whom we could probably have a more profound impact. However, now that I think about it, I got the idea from my own past. I think I wanted to show them why I loved gardening as a child, and why I like it now. I wanted them to embrace the green in them, just like I was lucky enough to do.
Organizing this event really reminded me of my journey and when I realized why I do community service. I have never done community service for show. I help others because they need to be helped. Sometimes, it is not immediately visible how they need to be helped, but perseverance and dedication will eventually reveal a solution. Community service, for me, was not about giving back. Giving back shows the imagery of a glass of water being poured into another glass, then eventually poured back. It implies a finite amount of something which is taken away and given back. Service is about giving: building up or pushing forwards. Each action cannot take something away in order to give it back. The key to service is the compassion and empathy one has which prevents them from needing to take something away to give it back. One cannot take away something from a community by being part of it. Everything that happens to a community enriches it, and that needs to be recognized.
Rooftop taught me what service was to me. Although Rooftop started out just as a garden for me, as time went by, I started to realize that it was much more than that. Rooftop served to do three things. The first is something everyone knows, Rooftop works to promote health by selling organic food. The second is something the members and some others know, that the ultimate aim of Rooftop is to showcase how sustainability is extremely important to the world and our community. However, only dedicated members know Rooftop Garden’s value also lies in creating a tangible community who stand for sustainability and the color green. I began to understand that Rooftop did not stand for the banning of things, rather, it stands for replacement: specifically, unhealthy, unsustainable foods and practices which are detrimental for the community. By having our foods in the cafeteria and selling produce, plants and seeds, we are trying to make our community more healthy and sustainable.
This gives us the responsibility of bringing nature into a man-made community. We are the ones who advocate for nature, and that is very important to recognize. There is a real value in standing for something and holding the responsibility, which is the fact that it makes us, as students, more conscientious of our roles as students and as budding global citizens. This responsibility is a large task, and I hope I can continue contributing to it.