From the Intern Desk …

This week’s entry was written by Derek, a junior at the University of Notre Dame and founding member of the Double Down sandwich fan club:

My jaw dropped when a gentleman whom I was helping draft a resume in the Tenderloin Tech lab told me where he got his high school diploma from. It took a second to register as I punched in the name of his school under the Education section of the word document that we were working on. “NO WAY”, I turned my chair to face him. “You’re from Ossining?” The man cracked a wide grin, “Born and raised!” I was completely blown away that here I was, in San Francisco, a new intern at St. Anthony’s who had never been to California before, sitting with a client in the third floor tech lab who just happened to used to live two streets down from the house that I grew up in. We laughed and gave each other a high five like we had just won the world-series (now both of us, being New Yorkers and fans of the Yankees, are no strangers to winning world-series.)

After that moment, it was as if we had known each other all our lives. We were all smiles as we swapped our experiences and memories about home, traded stories about how we got out to San Francisco, and mused about the small world that we live in. For a few minutes that day, my friend’s arduous job search became less stressful, and my nerves about being a stranger in a new town and a new workplace were gone. We were each a little bit of home for the other and we gave something to each other and traded encouragement and strength, not with specific words, but just because we were two guys from “O-town” who had found each other over two thousand five hundred miles away.

Finding that simple, natural connection with someone else and that feeling of solidarity with a complete stranger is the treasure of service. That gift is abundant at St. Anthony’s in interactions with clients and with the staff. Having experienced it already, I could not be more excited for my next six weeks here.