Volunteering with Addicts by Ahlanna

Volunteering with Addicts by Ahlanna - May 2018 Scholarship Essay

I have spent a lot of time volunteering. I have volunteered with sixth through eighth graders, elderly folks, and food banks, but none have taught me as much as volunteering with addicts. When I was sixteen I decided to volunteer to go on a trip to Vancouver, British Columbia. Vancouver is a beautiful place; the city is full of fun attractions, beautiful buildings, and great views. What people don’t know is it also is full of addiction, poverty, and disease.
When my group got there we were told we would be working in soup kitchens, half way houses, and resource centers. They warned us that we would be working with and around drug addicted populations and places where there was a lot of prostitution. I knew I would be out of my comfort zone and helping in areas where drugs and prostitution ran rapid. I did not however know what a wonderful experience it would be. The first day I began working I had expected to be cleaning, making food, and packing care boxes, but instead the people wo organized the trip had us go out on the street and talk to all of the people there. I was terrified. I and two of my friends, all of us under the age of eighteen, were supposed to go out and talk to, sit with, and eat lunches we had packed with strangers. More than that they were strangers we would have typically pegged as dangerous. We walked around for about an hour avoiding eye contact with everyone we saw out of fear.
Finally, we stopped. We all looked at each other and decided to stop being ridiculous and do what we were there to do meet and eat lunch with someone on the street. We finally met a man named, Scott. Scott was forty-five and had moved to Vancouver from his hometown in Nova Scotia when he was nineteen. He arrived in Vancouver with a job already lined up, but nowhere to stay. He got a room in a motel and started work, looking for a place that was affordable enough for him to live. Vancouver was and still is a very expensive city to live in. While he was looking for somewhere to live he was fired from his job. He slowly began to run out of money. He fell in with the wrong crowd and at twenty-three he found himself living on the street with no job and no money, addicted to heroin. Scott went on to tell us that he had tried multiple times using the resources in Vancouver to get out of his addiction and get back on his feet but was unsuccessful. No one would give him a job and the only thing that made him feel better was his drugs. After Scott my group felt ready to talk to anyone.
We talked to five more people that day and found a common occurrence among them. They all said the worst part about their situation was that people looked at them like they were animals and treated them poorly. I learned a valuable lesson that day. I learned that when we see people on the street we should look at them with much kinder, much more giving eyes. They aren’t bad people; they just got mixed up in wrong thing. Going on that trip taught me the value of human connection ad kindness. I will never forget that trip.