The Sunday Suppers - Richard Hoshino

Appeared in the book Notes from Canada's Young Activists, published by Greystone Books (2007).

Buttering bread, serving hot food on paper plates, passing out ketchup, and wiping up tables.would you believe this work was the highlight of my week?

I volunteered at a Sunday Suppers program for the underprivileged in Halifax. Close to three hundred people walked through the doors of St. Andrew.s Church every Sunday afternoon where a caring team of volunteers treated them to a warm meal and unlimited coffee and juice. We served people in our community who were down on their luck, from single mothers struggling below the poverty line to older men with disabilities who couldn.t find a steady job. We learned that our friends from Sunday Suppers weren.t so-called welfare bums.a horrible term.but real people looking for hope, and somehow they found a little bit each week.

And yet, until a few years ago, such simple acts of service had no place on my to-do list. For a long time, I couldn.t care less about volunteering.

I.ve lived a life of incredible privilege. My parents came to Toronto from Japan just before I was born, and like many immigrants, they made sacrifices for their child. They worked hard to send me to private school and provide me with unlimited opportunities. They instilled in me a love of learning I.ve never lost and taught me the value of ambition and hard work. They also recognized my aptitude for mathematics. In my last year of high school I represented Canada at the International Mathematical Olympiad; later I studied math on a scholarship at the University of Waterloo and continued my education as a graduate student at Dalhousie University in Halifax. Outside the classroom, I fostered intercultural dialogue among youth, gave presentations on innovative mathematics pedagogy at a number of conferences, and established successful math outreach programs for high school students and their teachers. Although all of these efforts were important and appeared altruistic, I was solely focused on my self-serving ambitions. I freely admit that I piled up responsibilities to make my rsum stand out and that all of my initiatives were to advance my career.

In 2003, I received a fellowship with Action Canada, a program to identify and develop future Canadian leaders. I relished this unique opportunity to be exposed to important public policy issues, and I looked forward to networking with some of Canada.s most influential young people. I considered .leadership. strictly a matter of power and influence and hoped my Action Canada experience would increase my stature.

I didn.t at all expect a complete paradigm shift.the realization that leadership isn.t about power or influence but about service. One experience in particular had a transformative effect on my life.

In September 2003, the twenty Action Canada fellows met in Vancouver for a one-week conference. We spent a full day examining the issues facing Vancouver.s Downtown Eastside. We toured the infamous neighbourhood, seeing for ourselves the drug use, prostitution, and extraordinary poverty that plagued its streets. That evening we watched an award-winning documentary by Nellie Wild called FIX: The Story of An Addicted City. The film followed the lives of Ann Livingston and Dean Wilson, two of the major lobbyists for a controversial safe injection site in the Downtown Eastside, the first such facility in Canada. Dean was a former IBM salesman who has been addicted to heroin for almost thirty-five years. His partner, Ann, had never used drugs in her life and had recently converted to Christianity.

One scene spoke deeply to me. Ann is sitting by herself in a church, quietly praying during the service. No one is seated within five feet of her because of her ties to the heroin community. Despite the Biblical commands to love and care for one another, no one approaches Ann to engage in conversation or offer their support or prayers. Ann speaks directly into the camera in response to the hypocrisy around her: .There really is only one message that Christ had, and it was that you.re to always reach out to people who have nothing. You.re always to stand in the most uncomfortable place with the ugly, the rejected, the smelly, the sick. Whatever it is for you. And be in that place where you.re going, .I hate this..and doing it anyway..

These words transformed me. As a Christian myself, I reflected on what I was doing to reach out to the underprivileged. The answer was obvious: I was doing absolutely nothing. Ann quoted the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats (Matthew 25:31.46), a lesson I knew in my head but not in my heart. This parable teaches Christians to serve those who have been rejected by society, by feeding the hungry, comforting the sick, and providing clothes to those in need. I had convinced myself that my hectic work weeks excused me from helping others. I felt strongly that each hour spent volunteering would be an hour lost doing something more important. As I watched the documentary that night, I recognized my self-righteous hypocrisy and discovered that through Ann.s words God was speaking directly to me.

After the screening, we were invited to dinner with the people involved in the film. Ann and Dean were both there and had brought along their ten-month-old baby, Joseph, whom I asked if I could hold. I can.t describe the thoughts that rushed through my mind as I held this beautiful baby, knowing his father was a heroin addict who didn.t have a community to support him with compassion and love. As Ann said in the documentary, Christians like me were doing nothing for the Dean Wilsons of our society. As I clutched Joseph in my arms, I heard a voice from deep within my heart: .Richard, what are you doing to help my people?.

As soon as I got home, I began volunteering at The Fish, a coffee house ministry for the underprivileged in Halifax, held every Saturday night.  I met people I never cared to associate myself with before, like those with severe physical disabilities and others suffering from drug and alcohol addictions.  I had unfairly assumed that because they had not achieved successful careers that they would have nothing to teach me.  Working with these individuals was a new and difficult experience: I was a rich private-school kid who knew virtually no one who'd come from difficult circumstances.  I felt self-conscious and awkward, and it was hard to make conversation.

But slowly, I built trust with those I served, playing cards and cribbage with them and showing them a mathematical strategy to play Connect Four.my graduate degrees finally coming in handy! As I got to know my new friends and heard their stories, my presumptions dissolved. I befriended, among many others, a woman who acquired HIV through a bad blood transfusion and a remarkable blind man who wrote for a street newspaper to raise awareness of poverty issues and who sat on the executive committee of the North American Street Newspaper Association.

I discovered, to my surprise, that many of Halifax.s welfare recipients either worked or were upgrading their skills to return to the workforce. Often because of various mental or physical challenges, welfare recipients mostly worked menial jobs like cleaning floors or washing dishes at a restaurant. After the 70 per cent claw-back they had to give the provincial government for working while on social assistance, welfare recipients earned less than two dollars an hour for their labour. Despite this challenge, many pressed on with the determination that they could climb out of poverty and secure a better future for themselves and their children. The Fish was a remarkable place because it didn.t elevate the volunteers above those they served; instead, it provided a space of genuine interaction among equals, and I learned so much just by watching and listening to this interaction.

My new friends challenged me to think more holistically about the community I lived in and to find proactive ways to serve it. My high school mandated that each student complete a set number of community service hours each year. To complete my hours, I deliberately selected easy tasks that required minimal effort and no commitment. Looking back, I can see that my volunteerism was a patronizing form of charity that meant nothing to me. I used to focus on what I would get from volunteering. Now, I focus strictly on the people I serve, and I aim to meet their needs to the best of my ability. Now that I finally understood and took seriously my commitment to service, I found myself empowered and becoming more compassionate, less judgmental, and more cognizant of how I spent my time and money. I discovered that the more I learned to willingly serve others, the easier it was to share God.s love with those less fortunate.

            When I learned about the Sunday Suppers program, I started volunteering there, too, finding it even more rewarding than The Fish. I only volunteered for four hours each week, but still, I feel that what I did made a small yet tangible difference in my community, which grew to include more than just other mathematicians. Two friends from The Fish once pooled their leftover savings from their monthly disability assistance and treated me to a magnificent Chinese buffet. We spoke for nearly five hours and gained about ten pounds each. I was so challenged and inspired by the compassion and generosity of our guests at The Fish and Sunday Suppers.

Unless I was out of town I never missed either of my volunteer commitments, regardless of how busy I was with work. It shouldn.t have been a surprise to me, but the more I volunteered, the happier I became.

After graduate school, I moved to Ottawa to work for the federal government. Here I.ve found a remarkable organization called The Mission. It has an emergency shelter for over two hundred guests a night, chaplaincy services, a hospice, programs for addiction recovery and job training, and a state-of the-art kitchen that served over 333,000 meals in 2004. Currently, I volunteer in the kitchen, but my great hope is to be involved in The Mission.s Discovery University program, where local professors provide free post-secondary education to people living below the poverty line. Similar .free university. initiatives in Vancouver, Calgary, and Halifax already play a vital role in those communities. Such programs go beyond basic needs and .job skills. to provide underprivileged people with an opportunity to engage in subjects such as philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and English literature. Many students develop a new thirst for acquiring knowledge and improve their abilities to resolve conflicts and solve problems. Graduates of the program have gone on to become more active in their communities, take up volunteerism, become self-employed, and in some cases, enroll in full-time studies at a college or university.

Volunteerism, I.ve discovered, isn't about logging hours or having something altruistic to add to a resume. It's about serving others from a willing and cheerful heart. I'm so thankful to have learned this lesson, and through my genuine desire to serve others, I feel I now have a closer relationship with my God.

Richard Hoshino is originally from Toronto but proudly calls himself a Maritimer after having spent four wonderful years in Atlantic Canada. Richard currently works as a Senior Project Officer for the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), hired under the federal government's prestigious Recruitment of Policy Leaders initiative. At CBSA, Richard uses mathematics to help improve the security and efficiency of the Canadian border. He continues to volunteer for The Ottawa Mission.