One Mentor's Experience
| One Mentor's Experience |
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I joined the mentor team – which I think of as more of a “companion” team - to have a concrete experience of being with someone who has substantially fewer external resources than I have. My day job is very abstract: I am a policy advocate for low-income Medicare beneficiaries and it is rare to see the concrete effects of my work. My life has been privileged; I have not known economic or housing insecurity. Interactions with our mentee are daily reminders to me of the hurdles many people have to jump through to accomplish ordinary things like getting to appointments on time without a car or finding child care for the random moment when a job interview is offered. I get discouraged just knowing of the hurdles and I don’t have to actually jump over them.A spiritual and practical challenge for us "companions" is to draw the line between helping and enabling, and to make suggestions and model different behavior without trying to impose our view of “the right answer” on a situation. Because of resources of time, money and reliable cars, we can help out in a pinch. But we don’t want to be a default plan that inadvertently becomes THE plan. We have come to realize that each person in the family needs mentoring or companionship. Some of us spend more time with the kids, sometimes one on one, or sometimes with the kids together. And, we get our own families involved. My twenty-four year old daughter, for example, is tutoring our mentee’s 12 year old daughter in Spanish. I have no doubt that the relationship is about way more than Spanish. The kids need a lot of loving and special attention as their parent or parents work hard to get back on track. Do we see “results” of our efforts? Can we tell we’ve made a difference? Have our mentees changed their bad habits? Have you? Have I? I’ve been trying for over a year, unsuccessfully, to lose 10 pounds. Change is hard, and comes slowly. But in the bigger picture, our mentee said to me the other day that she counts it as a huge success in her life that she is no longer living in the drug-infested, despair-saturated world of the projects where she grew up, a world accurately portrayed, so she tells me in the first season of the popular HBO series, “The Wire.” If you’ve seen “The Wire,” you know that getting out seems nearly impossible. Did I have one scintilla of effect on her achieving that goal? I really don’t have a clue; I only know that I have tried to be a good "companion" on the journey, helping out where I can, celebrating things that should be celebrated, gently nudging her in directions that seem to me would be helpful to her or her kids.
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