“The best test, and the most difficult to administer is: Do those served grow as persons; do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?” – Robert Greenleaf, Servant Leadership
Through my experiences at my internship - yes, I definitely see how people served grow and become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous and more likely to become servants. However, I also see some of the women with deferred prosecutions who do not care to take responsibility for their actions and work towards staying off the streets and out of jail. The beautiful part about my internship is that my coworkers and I work very hard to always put the women (clients) first. Any staff member will drop whatever it is that they are doing if one of the women comes in need of help. This is also a frustrating part of my job. We bend over backwards to constantly check up on them and help them get what they need, but a lot of them don’t seem to care about the effort we put in. As my boss says, if they just meet us a third of the way – we will go the other two thirds to help them. Unfortunately, lately it seems like a lot of women do not care to make that kind of effort. Yesterday we met with the District Attorney and the Public Defender’s office to discuss some of these non-compliant women so they do not fall through the cracks. They will get one last chance…otherwise many of them will get bench warrants issued. It ends up being a case of tough love – which is often difficult to accept. But as I start to teach a class on Mondays, I begin to understand on a level I didn’t even think possible what these women go through. And as I get to know them on a deeper level, the success stories (while sometimes few and far between) completely outweigh the non-successful stories. The truly amazing part for me in all of this is that while I am trying to help these women to the best of my ability, I have found myself again. Working every day and having that consistent contact with the women and my coworkers has given me a new sense of what I want to go to graduate school for and what I am ultimately meant to do with my life. I have finally come back to the same dream I had when I first came to college: working in a clinical setting with women. Many of psychology’s fascinating topics has diverted my attention away from that and allowed me to learn things that I probably wouldn’t have ever known otherwise. But as I start my last semester this fall, I feel confident that this internship was meant to be in so many different ways. And there is nothing more reassuring than learning that your original dream is exactly where you are supposed to be.
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