The school looked extremely out of place in the neighborhood it was in. It was the kind of neighborhood where you lock your doors all the time and stay off the streets at night.  I am a Junior in high school, and last summer I was looking for leadership opportunities in order to complete the National Honors Society requirements. I had already done a bunch of volunteer work in order to get all the service hours that were required for the application. I was talking to my parents about the leadership requirement and was wondering if they had any ideas. My dad mentioned an organization called By the Hand. My grandparents and great uncle have been donating money there for a couple years. That's how my dad knew about it. I had never heard of it before. He said it was a program in a  Catholic school, on the West Side of Chicago, for young kids,during the summer. I wasn’t sold on the idea, but my dad said it was a great organization, and it would be a good opportunity to fill my leadership requirement, so I agreed to do it.

My dad set up a meeting between a women that helps run the organization and myself. He tagged along, too, because he wanted to learn more about By the Hand and what they really do. We went out to lunch at the Pick, in Uptown, Park Ridge. She said that they only help grades kindergarten through second grade, but they plan on adding a grade each year. She told me more about how they are helping to get these young kids off the streets and into a safe learning environment, while their parents are working, during the day. This is when I started to get more interested in helping out at By the Hand. She then told what I was going to have to do. I needed to organize a group of friends to go there and help out. I only needed about eight kids. I also needed to figure out how to get everyone there. It didn’t take me long to get together a group of friends that I thought would do well with helping out at By the Hand. Most of them were applying for National Honors Society, and they needed volunteer hours. I decided that we would help out there for one week, since I had never done it before, and I was not one hundred percent positive what I was getting us into. I had everyone meet up at my house before we drove there. We all piled into my car, and  I drove everyone there. It was about a half-hour drive. As we made our way there, you could slowly see how the neighborhood was changing. The green trees and lawns of the suburbs disappeared, as we entered the concrete world ot the city limits. When we got there, the By the Hand office  was in a huge, modern looking building. It was mostly grey, but it it had these massive green squares, with pictures of little kids that had smiles, that looked  so happy and cheerful. The pictures of these jaunty children made the school seem like an “outlier” because of the look of the houses that surrounded it. You could see a set of train tracks from the school’s parking lot, and I can remember how it was just covered in graffiti. When we first entered the school, they had a pretty elaborate security system. We had to go through two sets of doors to just get to the front desk, where we signed in and then we had to go through another door. They were all locked.

Once we were in the actual school, the little kids were playing, running around and laughing with one another, without a care in the world. You could tell the people standing against the walls were their teachers because of the way they were talking to, and playing with, the kids. When it was time to start the day, all the kids lined up according to their grade and went off to their separate classrooms. I helped out with the second graders. In the mornings, they would first start out with a fun activity, next they would go into Bible study, then it was lunch, late they would practice reading and math on computers, and, finally, they  ended the day with another fun activity. While they would work on computers, I would help the kids that were the most behind in school. The craziest part of the day, though, was when the kids’ parents were picking them up. I think it was because they were supposed to sit in a single file line, and what little kid wants to sit in a single file line? However, you could tell which kids wanted to go home and which kids didn’t. You could tell that the reason why some of the kids didn’t want to go home was because they didn’t have a good home life.

My group and I helped out for one week. It was one of the fastest weeks of my life because it was so much fun playing with these little kids. When the kids asked how long I was going to be there for and I only said one, they were all really sad because even though it was only one week, I was able to build some pretty cool relationships with the kids. They all asked me why I was leaving, and I told them that I had to work and make some money.  Most of them understood, but one little girl came up to me and asked, “What do you need money for that you don’t already have?” That instantly made me think of how they get by with what they have, compared to what I have. I always knew I was very fortunate and extremely lucky, but it never dawned on me  just how much, until that moment. It’s hard to describe, but it was like an  “aha” moment.

This experience changed the way that I view life. Over the past year, when it was my birthday and Christmas, and people were asking me what I wanted for a present, it was much harder to think of something because I just kept on thinking about that class of second graders. I still find it crazy how I went into By the Hand not expecting anything big, but my life did  change, for the better. I’m already making plans and setting up a group to go back to By the Hand for even longer this summer.