Musings on the role of service

I’ve grown bitter about how and why people serve.

We had lengthy discussion about this in my freshman year, during these dinners where we’d hold discussions about what it means to serve, why people serve, and what matters most.

Some people say sacrifice is necessary for service. Others say the intent behind the service is what matters most.

I’d argue that the consequences of an action can matter more than the intent behind the action.

There are plenty of people I know who used service as a means to an end — to strengthen their resume, to make themselves look better on med school applications, to up their chances for getting into college.

And I frankly don’t care what people’s motivations are. What matters is what they did for their service.

I’ve been thinking back to the service I did in the past, and it’s questionable whether that service helped the communities I intended to serve.

When you go into a new country and purport that you know better than they do, that you have a more advanced understandings of the issues that plague them — that’s a major problem. Because you don’t know shit, even if you’ve studied that area for your entire life. Living somewhere and reading about the circumstances there are very different things.

It’s the whole “working for” model that I find issue with. Not only is it pretentious and paternalistic, you can often do more harm than good.

As an example, there was a time when people donated mosquito nets to a village afflicted by disease-carrying mosquitoes. But people didn’t always use the nets properly. Some even used them for fishing and wound up getting food poisoning due to the toxins present on the nets themselves.

These unintended consequences wound up doing more harm than good.

What the remedy is, I’m not sure. But I know that being a do-gooder with the best intentions doesn’t count for shit if your actions don’t empower those who are already living in those circumstances to move towards technological progress.

There was another city where someone developed a microcredit system, to help lift people out of poverty. As it turned out, giving people the money and resources for them to learn how to 1) manage their own finances and 2) secure the necessary resources for living paid out in the long run. People could pay off the loans they’d accrued at relatively low interest rates, and their standard of living was drastically improved.

These tidbits of information from my PUBPOL 301 class have come back to me over time. I can’t remember where the sources came from exactly, but these have shown me the nuances related to service and/or well-intentioned work. They’re things I keep in mind moving forward, as I determine the best way for me to become a public servant in the future.