March is celebrated as Social Work Month worldwide.

Conversations around the subject made me reminisce about the good old days of when I was a volunteer at a Delhi based NGO that focuses on empowering under-served children and youth. I was 18 when I started visiting the all-girls home because a) I really enjoyed social work and b) We were not allowed to pass college without 60 hours of compulsory social work.

As a child, I remember being extremely passionate about social work but never saw myself making an active effort to create an impact on the community. My first week into college, I knew I had an opportunity to do my bit right in front of me.

And truly, what started off as a partial obligation turned into one of my best college memories. I believe that many of those experiences shaped me into the person I am today. I can never really put into words all the learnings I got from my visits, yet here I am with a list of the four most important lessons I learned from two years of my social work experience.

Value My Inner Circle

Oftentimes in life, I found myself being generous to strangers but stingy with family. I feel like all of us have tendencies to take our inner circle for granted until the world turns its back on us. Being involved in social service was a constant reminder to not live my life that way.

The NGO that I volunteered at supported kids whose parents could not afford their education, which meant that I got an opportunity to interact with some of these parents on days when they paid a visit. The fact that I witnessed hardly three such interactions in two years of my regular visits at a place that had around 15 girls bewilders me to this day. I saw their longing to be around family and it made me value mine. I started noticing beauty in even the littlest interactions with friends and family, and how that is something that should never be taken for granted.

Empathy

As a volunteer, I was only supposed to visit the NGO thrice a week, help the kids with their homework, conduct one group activity each month, fill out my log sheet and return. But I chose to go beyond what was expected of me and tried to build a deeper connection with the kids to understand how they truly felt. Sometimes, they opened up to me about things that were a little difficult to discuss at therapy sessions. By the end, I transformed into a patient listener, better at communication and truly exposed to understanding and practising empathy.

Greater Confidence To Face My Own Challenges

As a typical freshman at college, I had an urge to be at the top of my class. Getting into as many college societies as possible was the ultimate goal, and it required getting out of my comfort zone a bit to socialise. Navigating through college life seemed painful, but not as much as a 15-year-old living away from family, dealing with abandonment issues, forced by circumstances to mature at an early age.

Seeing the resilience of those kids changed my mindset of approaching life challenges, which started to seem really small in front of the real issues that I was witnessing at that time. I knew it wasn’t the end of the world if I scored less in an exam, or got rejected by a college society. I just had to keep trying and never give up.

Eliminate Judgement

“Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be kind. Always.”

This quote never made sense to me until the time I completed my first month as a volunteer at the NGO. The first few visits mostly dealt with rapport-building with the kids. You could smell the excitement in the air of that two-bedroom floor. Just like everyone else, I was super excited to just be a part of their everyday lives. As I slowly got to interact with the girls, I could notice their insecurities creeping up in conversations. They lived a life entirely different from all their peers at school and never complained, but it was possible to sense their pain when they opened up about being treated differently by their teachers and peers.

Judging someone is easy, but we never know what can be triggering for them. Having kindness and respect towards everyone thus becomes fundamental.

Social work has opened new doors of thinking for me in a way that I had never imagined. I believe that it’s a journey that will ground you like no other experience will ever be able to. If you have never actively contributed to social services, there’s no better time than to start now. You’ll be surprised to see how much more you’d be able to learn in a single day than cramming your textbook or spending a typical day at work.

Note: I am choosing to value the privacy of those kids at the NGO, thus haven’t talked about specific instances in this article.

This blog post is a brief summary of some valuable lessons that I learned from my time spent with kids at the NGO. :)