Students for International Mission Service (SIMS)

Outlook, Spring 2000

Volunteering with SIMS
by Stacey Anderson, English professor, University of California, Riverside

SIMS volunteers help register patients at the check-in desk during a monthly mission to El Hongo, Mexico.

When did you commit your life to Christ?" This simple question left me squirming in my seat on the way home from a SIMS weekend in El Hongo.

As an academic and an Episcopalian, I move in worlds where the simplest questions often have the most elusive answers. I embrace the struggle to listen and to discern. I thought about my baptismal vows, about the stirrings of my faith before and since I had taken those vows. The best I could do was to talk about why my religious commitment was always growing, always unfolding, and never, ever completed. The conversation went on from there as we counted down the miles.

I am not part of the Loma Linda community, since I neither work nor study at the University. But these trips (to Mexico) are open to all comers. SIMS offers me the chance to be of service in a health-care environment and to fellowship with new people and in different ways.

Truth be told, during the first minutes of my first of three trips to El Hongo, I had some qualms about participating. I didn't know what to expect. I missed my church and felt dislocated from my customary social and spiritual circles.

More than any of this, though, I wondered how the El Hongo clinic would run. Here we were coming from an economically wealthy country to a poorer one to pass out advice, medications, and, yes, some prayer.

I had seen programs which to my mind put down the very communities they claimed to serve.

These are some of the precious children from El Hongo, Mexico, that Ms. Anderson writes about. Participating with the program and helping provide health care to people there has challenged Ms. Anderson to think about the importance of her relationship with Christ.

I didn't want to swell my own self-satisfaction at the expense of someone else's. How would we avoid this challenge? Open and questioning, we headed for the border.

Clearly I enjoyed my time with SIMS, or I would not have returned. Before the end of the van ride to Mexico on that first trip, I found myself knit into the group. Each trip is so different from the others, but I really enjoy returning to the same place.

I have interviewed patients, sung, prayed, and worked with physicians in the pharmacy and during their exams. I walked around town and listened to the wind. I played ball, colored with the kids and fussed over them. I myself was served, fed, hugged, and otherwise fussed over by friends in El Hongo. I have visited church members at their homes, run the front desk at the clinic, and spoken more Spanish than I would have thought possible.

As for the danger of diminishing the people one tries to serve, guarding against this wrong-minded approach must be the constant work of the organization and each volunteer. SIMS for me has been an extremely positive experience on this front.

I really look forward to these weekend trips with SIMS. I view them as retreats. We step together into a quiet space and are called to have a special attentiveness. We listen to one another with greater care than we might manage at other times and in doing that we reach for God.

My time in El Hongo is meditative, elemental. And did I mention the kids' drawings hanging at home on my fridge? They brighten my home, and I hope that we have, in a small way, brightened theirs.

Editor's note: Ms. Anderson applied to the LLU School of Medicine and recently was notified that she has been accepted. SIMS congratulations her for this accomplishment.

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