Things Learned

"You are young, you stand before beginnings. I would beg of you, dear friend, as well as I can to have patience with all that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves like locked doors, or like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot be given to you because you could not live them. It is with the question of experiencing everything. You need to live the questions and perhaps you will without even noticing find yourself experiencing the answer some distant day" (Rilke).
I believe in every situation there is an opportunity to learn. And you cannot learn with out asking questions. This semester as I’ve spent time at Jessie’s Place and Family Court I have had to ask tough questions of myself and it is usually when I go home and reflect on my experience at my site each day that I begin to ask questions of myself rather than just of my experience. How would I have handled this situation? Could I be the person taking someone’s kid away from them? How do these people sleep at night, knowing that tomorrow they are defending someone who is obviously guilty? Through the hands on learning environment that my internships have provided me I was allowed to see other people making tough choices, and in tough situations and see how they handle them day after day. I was allowed to think about my reaction to these things so that in the future, when I am the one in their shoes I will be better prepared.
The experience gained through my internships and the questions they have lead me to ask are shaping me into the helping professional I am going to become. Had it not been for these experiences and these questions the next steps of my life and beginning a career would still be waiting for me to figure them out; stepping off the stage at graduation with a diploma in my hand would be the first time I asked these questions and maybe I wouldn’t be asking the same questions because I would not know what to ask. The transition into the real world would be so much more of a mystery and more difficult to walk toward.
In my first day at Jessie’s Place, I was given a tour of the facility the way I looked at the rooms as I walked down the hallway that first day is very different from how I see them now. When I first saw the rooms, I saw how simple they were, how generic and honestly dirty they looked. I saw rooms with 4 beds in them and how the space was divided for 4 women to live in this one room that is no bigger than the bedroom I live in by myself. I saw so little of an opportunity for privacy. I couldn’t imagine having to live in them. Now I walk down that same hallway, I look in those same rooms and I see the hope they provide for the women, the warm blanket they wouldn’t have otherwise (no matter how ugly and dirty it looks, it keeps them warm). I see the community they have created and their lives that are interwoven together, as they work together to overcome the obstacles they face daily.
Every day at Family Court I encounter new people, I’ve seen women who have left Jessie’s Place and are now working to regain custody of their children, I’ve seen teenagers who refuse to go to school, I’ve seen children who look like they just rolled around in a pile of dirt and snot, and I’ve seen teenagers on trial for murder. As I walk through the waiting area each day, with new eyes looking at me, and new faces to see; I get the same looks and I get the same questions as the day before. I am dressed well, I walk through the waiting area with confidence, and I talk to the staff as I go, because of this I am viewed as someone who must be able to help them. Maybe I’ll be the one person that finally gives them some answers as they wait to hear what is happening in the courtroom or in the lawyer’s deliberations. I right now am in no position to be able to answer their questions, unless its where’s the bathroom, but I am on a path where I will one day be able to. Through my internship at Family Court I was able to see the blessings I have been given, in a matter of days I will have a college degree. With a new understanding of the gifts I’ve been given, I see the responsibilities that I have; with great privilege comes great responsibility. Because I have been educated, and will continue my education, I have an obligation to speak for those that can’t, to help people who were born into a life and into circumstances that they don’t understand. I know and have seen the people that are out there working the system and I hope to be able to bring justice to them, but my hope is to fight for those who the system is working, who just can’t seem to get on their feet alone, the people who’ve been given up on.
My time spend at Family Court has been a learning experience of the journey people have taken through law school. As I begin to prepare for this phase of my life, it was helpful to see people who have gotten through and how they accomplished this. I was able to talk with lawyers about the process of getting into Law School, which is very helpful as it can be very confusing. I’ve also been able to build up a network of people that I can ask questions and advice of as I walk through the process of getting into and beginning law school.
Through working at both Jessie’s Place and Family Court I have been able to learn a variety of advocacy skills. The advocacy skills I have learned are primarily for homeless women and children and juveniles that are in trouble with the law; however, these skills can easily be transferred and are a stepping stone to working with many other types of clients that I may come in contact with as I begin working. These skills are shaping the professional that I will become, and are skills that I will carry with me throughout my entire career.
In both of my internships I have learned about working directly with people. People who are very different from me, as well as people who aren’t so different from me. I have learned about and experienced relationships, with people from all walks of life. I have learned that you have to allow relationships time to develop, when working with people you cannot force them to trust you and to listen to you; you have to earn their trust and you have to allow them the opportunity to make the choice to listen and trust. I have had to opportunity learn about working in diversity, because of this I have developed an awareness of my own culture and how it affects me. Your culture becomes a part of how you think as you grown up, and until I interact with other cultures and people who have been raised differently that I was, I am unable to fully understand my own culture.
This semester I have learned a great deal about communicating and collaborating with clients, volunteers, my peers and the staff at my agencies. This is a vital key to success in the professional realm, you have to collaborate with people outside your agency to gain resources and volunteers, you have to collaborate with other agencies to effectively help your target population, and you have to communicate and collaborate effectively with your fellow staff members to better be able to serve your clients. My internship gave me the opportunity to practice these skills and learn as I watched other people using them.
As a helping professional I will be asked to fulfill a variety of roles, for my agency as well as my clients. I have been able to gain an understanding of some of the roles I might be asked to fill as well as how to fill them.
In Dr. Davis’ Family Life Education Class we discussed relational ethics and one of the primary elements is that, relationships are the context in which we interpret what we do. This has been very apparent to me through out my internship experience. Everything we do as a helping professional is and needs to be done through the context of our relationships. An example of this is the Family Life Education workshop I taught at Jessie’s Place, had I not spend the semester building a relationship with the women and learning about their lives I would not have been able to teach on finances and budgeting and been received well. However because I had learned where the women struggled and had gained their trust and respect I was able to help them learn about budgeting and gain confidence that once they leave Jessie’s Place they will be able to do this on their own. I was able to take the knowledge I had learned in my courses at Samford and teach it so that it was specific to the needs of the women surrounding me.
Through out this semester I have been faced with a lot of ethical issues and learning boundaries of working with people. I had a few women at Jessie’s Place that asked me to come and visit them at work, and while I was glad to see them doing well in their job, honored that they’d ask me, and I wanted to see them succeeding; I had to make sure they understood I wouldn’t act like I knew them unless they began the interaction. I also to make them aware that they would be the one to define the relationship; how I knew them to their co-workers, so if they just want to say we’re friends or if they wanted to tell them that I was the intern at the homeless shelter they lived at.
While I was doing my internship at Jessie’s Place I was also preparing to teach my Family Life Education workshop there was well, when we would discuss trips we made to Jessie’s Place for FLE in class I had to constantly remind the girls in my group that we couldn’t say names or give too many details to situations because we were not respecting the privacy of the women at Jessie’s Place. Through this I was reminded how easy it is to accidentally share too much information, and how careful you must be when you are talking about “work”, when work is people’s lives.
Another ethical issue I came into contact with this semester was that I was able to sit in on intakes and to read client files at Jessie’s Place, because of this I learned a lot about the women, their past and some medical conditions. I had to interact with the women as if I did not know this information, because they hadn’t shared it with me. For example a few of the women were suffering from mental illnesses, which made a lot of the conversations and interactions I had with them make sense, however I could not interact with them any differently than I had before I knew. There was another woman who had a lot of credit card debt, I knew this from her file, one day she approached me and brought up her past debt which allowed us to talk a lot about credit cards, I could not have had this conversation with her until she brought it up, however valuable it was to me as I prepared my teaching plan for the workshop I taught. I also had to be very careful how I explained different things that had been happening at Jessie’s Place to my FLE group, because I had information ‘volunteers’ should not know about the women, and they knew I had information and wanted to know it.
I think the most valuable thing I will take away from my experience in my internships is something I had to do within myself, I had to break the stereotype that I had build in my mind. The main stereotype I had to break was of homeless women; I have grown up with my parents viewing homeless people as people who are lazy, who are ‘working the system’, who don’t deserve help until they help themselves, that they could not be homeless and poor if they didn’t want to be. I had to construct a positive view of human nature and people’s capacity to change. This could not have been done until I sat down and had my first conversation with one of the women at Jessie’s Place. I have been raised in a culture that basically believes people are homeless because they want to be. Now having spent time with these women and having learned their individual stories, I realize that that is not the case. Some of them did get there by poor decision-making; some of them have been through terrible situations. But I had to break the stereotype in my mind that said they were lazy and didn’t want to change, the reason they are at Jessie’s Place and participating in the program and following their rules is because they want to change and it is a daily struggle for them. I was not going to be able to help, or minister to these women until I did not view them this way. As our book suggested on page 146 I had to listen to clients with an attitude of openness and respect which is perhaps the most important thing I could do to overcome cultural barriers in my helping relationships. I had to learn to recognize the strengths of their culture, background, and situations instead of focusing solely on their needs.
There are still so many questions that I have and will have but I’ve learned to appreciate waiting to experience the answers until I am ready for them. As I eagerly wait at the starting point of my future, there is so much that I want to do, so many people I want to help and so much for me to experience. The words of President-Elect Obama are running through my head, “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek”. However as I have seen through my experience this semester in my internships, I still have so much to learn and there are still many avenues that I will walk down before I find my fit in making a difference in people’s lives. But I need to be open and aware of each relationship and each person in my life because there is something to learn from each of them and questions that may be answered with every experience.