After about thirty minutes of driving down Main Rd., we turned left on a little street called Heymock, where HFG sat situated next to a private school for children with disabilities. In order to get in, you had to press the buzzer and be let through a large, gray gate. Facing me was a large parking lot leading to a stone yellow building. I opened another gated door to get into the building. The walls were purple and bright pink and covered with painted-on inspirational quotes (think “don’t let anyone dull your sparkle”) and bible verses. Another gated door led me to the office area, which was a few rooms with a receptionist, a conference room, and an office for the organization’s social worker. 

 

The first thing I did was meet with the volunteer coordinator at HFG, Michelle. She was in her mid-twenties and had worked at the organization for a few years. She was bubbly, chatty, and was so excited that I had worked with young girls in the past (as a camp counselor for an overnight Jewish summer camp - I’m not totally sure she understood the difference in the demographics there). We went over internship standards and what I would be doing on a day-to-day basis. The morning, she explained, would be spent working on projects such as social media campaigns for their fundraisers, and planning lessons which were programs that I would create and run with the girls once they returned home from school. Every intern did different types of programs based on what they were confident in teaching and specializing in. I told Michelle that I would likely do different writing programs such as teaching the girls about journaling and poetry. She loved the idea and explained that while the girls were intelligent and creative, that the work they were assigned to do for school was boring and did not allow them to achieve their full potential, but it sounded like these writing programs would. Knowing that the girls would benefit from what I felt that I was good at was the boost of confidence that I needed on the first day of my internship. It helped confirm that I was there for the right reasons. 

 

We then started to discuss what it’s like to actually work and engage with the residents at HFG. Every girl at the home has been sexually abused at some point in their lives, in most cases by a relative. Because of this, many of the girls had outside issues such as bipolar disorder and other mood/personality disorders. Both Michelle and my Program Advisor, who had advised other interns at HFG before, warned me that the work was emotionally challenging and that the girls would probably be really standoffish at first; their lives are so inconsistent with people always entering and exiting them that they have a difficult time forming trust and creating relationships with people whom they know will not be there long. 

 

When I heard this, a switch flipped in my head. The reason that I was there was to be a positive force in these girls’ lives, not a negative one.

 

I began to question the reality of me being there and whether or not my presence was going to help or hurt. One of the primary reasons that I’ve enjoyed working with youth in the past is because of the relationship-building aspect of the interactions. I hadn’t yet thought about how damaging it could be for the girls at the home to get new interns every month, become close with them, and then have them yanked from their lives only to never see them again. The pit in my stomach that I was feeling earlier that day reopened and I became nervous and wary of the position that I was about to take. 

 

I knew since the day I signed my internship contract that I would only be there for two months, but the harsh reality of the situation failed to hit until that moment. It’s a part of my aforementioned privilege that I’m able to just come in, work, and leave at my own leisure, which is a shared aspect of almost all types of community service and voluntourism programs. Journalist Jacob Kushner commented on this vein of intentionality behind voluntourism after his trip to Haiti, where he saw Christian Missionaries building a school alongside a Methodist church. These volunteers paid thousands of dollars to fly in and build a school when the Haitian bricklayers could have done it themselves. Plus, the church lacked a sustainability plan - what was the school to do once it was built without any funding to pay teachers or buy school supplies? He argues that it would have been more efficient to put effort into improving education or simply just donating. 

 

I was worried that when I left after two months that I was going to leave an empty school building with no one to fill it. I knew I had to be intentional in going about my work and expressing why I was there both to myself and to the girls at the home. I started thinking about the reality of the situation and wondered whether or not the good that I was doing would be undermined by leaving at the end. Was it worse to try to form strong bonds with these girls to just have them ripped out of both of our hands at the end? It was unclear to me whether or not it would be worth it in the end for them, and if it was just rather selfish of me to be there.

After thinking about my predicament to myself a bit, I felt confident that I had all of my steps down correctly. I was to work closely with Michelle to plan all of my programs. We came up with a plan to ask the girls what they wanted to learn and how they wanted to learn it so that I could be as effective as possible. I was going to be conscious and intentional with this experience, unlike the Missionaries who did what they thought needed to be done instead of learning what actually needed to be done.

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My internship looked quite different from what I was expecting. The after school sessions that I was told I would be running happened only once or twice. This was in part because it was their winter break and I was responsible for hanging out all day with the 8 girls who were not able to travel home, doing activities such as going on walks to the public library, making collages from old magazines, and watching movies. Lots of movies. However, another reason was that by the time the girls got home from school, did their chores, and did their homework, they were completely wiped out and would have rather done anything than sit at a table and listen to me teach them different writing activities, even ones I thought were more fun and less academic. They just wanted to sit around and talk to me about life: their life, my life, the lives of celebrities, the lives of their families. Michelle didn’t seem to have a problem with this, so I rolled with it, but questioned my true purpose at the home. 

 

I formed relationships with the girls, some stronger than others, but was conscious about the way I was acting and the things that I was saying to try and not create false promises. I was told that these girls were suffering partly because of people like me who would come in and out of their lives just after creating seemingly meaningful relationships and because of this, I assumed that my coming and going would add to this damage. However, it’s possible that this could have been a privileged understanding of my role in their lives - who’s to say they hadn’t adjusted to this lifestyle? In fact, they had clearly adjusted better than I was prepared for. I had been emotional for the entire week leading up to my last day at my internship. Goodbyes have always been difficult for me, even if it’s saying goodbye to someone for a summer or a year. Knowing that the chances of me ever seeing these girls again were slim to none made me especially nervous and emotional, and although I did my best to stay strong, when it came time for me to leave, I couldn’t help but cry. Although the girls were visibly upset that I was leaving - giving me long hugs, telling me that they wanted me to stay, making me promise them to text them the second that I got home - the exit was clearly affecting me more than it was them. Was it selfish, or privileged, for me to believe that it wouldn’t? That they would obviously be more upset by it than I would? Of course, I wouldn’t be there to see the long term effects of it all and find out if they would speak highly of me to other volunteers or miss me once I was gone. I don’t know whether this was a privileged view or not.

 

Reflecting on the experience now, 8 months later, it seems as though I was trusting my own assessment of my values and not theirs. I might have been jumping the gun a bit in my belief that I would have such a strong, great impact on these girls’ lives. While we did share some wonderful memories and I do feel like I provided them with a sense of comfort and support, I don’t think that I changed their lives, and I don’t think that I was expecting to fully do so. I just knew that I wanted to do good and honestly, I don’t know how much of that I did, either. The effect that I had on their lives, and whether or not I did good or bad, is completely unknown to me. It still feels hard to tell.