Ed. Note: This entry was written by Noah, a junior at University of San Francisco. Noah’s role is to help coordinate the service-learning program for his peers who serve with St. Anthony Foundation:

My favorite days at St. Anthony’s are the days when someone takes you completely by surprise and teaches you a lesson about yourself. I had one of those days just last Friday at St. Anthony Dining Room. A guest sat down in front of me and we began eating our burritos together. I never got his name, but for the sake of this blog post, we’ll call him Ray, because he reminded me of my Uncle Ray. After we exchanged a smile, Ray saw my nametag and asked me what I did as an intern at St. Anthony’s. I told him that I went to USF and worked with students who do service-learning. He asked me my major; I told him that I was in International Relations. His response was, “Well, you better hurry up before it’s too late!” We shared some of our views over current events and the international order. Talk over politics and policy quickly turned to history and culture, and in order to emphasize some of his arguments with visual aids, Ray whipped out his iPhone to show me some pictures of late-Medieval and Renaissance art. Eventually, we ran out of things to talk about and were resigned to agree to disagree on certain issues. Ray finished his meal and went on his way. I was left a little bit surprised that a guest at St. Anthony’s might have an iPhone. But as I kept thinking, I became even more shocked by my own prejudice. It just goes to show that as much as we like to classify and categorize people with preconceived criteria, no demographic group is 100% homogenous. Most of the guests are St. Anthony’s probably don’t have iPhones, (just as most of my colleagues at USF probably don’t) but why shouldn’t some? St. Anthony’s serves all people, with and without homes, jobs, educations, families, legal resident statuses, cars, and yes, even iPhones. It takes individuals like Ray to remind me of this. You can bet that the next time I meet a guest in St. Anthony Dining Room, I won’t be making any assumptions about his or her mobile provider.

Tags: community, dining room, interns

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 18th, 2010 at 2:08 pm and is filed under People, Programs & Services. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.