It's our 3rd day here and our first day of service. We volunteered with the first street united saints program. We went to Renee's, whose house had been damaged from the hurricane. We spent the day priming the house, getting it ready to paint tomorrow. We also had the opportunity to revisit the mosque, which we visited yesterday for breakfast. There we also got to be present for an interfaith dialogue. The dialogue sparked a lot of ideas amoung our group , specifically about how to help impoverished communities.
Soon after we returned from the dialogue we had our usual group reflection. We read a short exerpt from The Nature of Oppression by M. Frye called The Bird Cage. It is from a mix of this dialogue and the reading that our group managed to pull together a strong problem of impoverished communities.
The main underlying idea of our discussion was that we need to take a macroscopic view of "the birdcage" in order to see that it's a systematic oppression which keeps people from getting out of the cycle of poverty. This leads to the title of our blog, which is the idea that it's not enough to just help people, but is important to help them learn the skills to help themselves.
-Rola and Elizabeth
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