A Life Changing Experience! Grand Canyon 2019

This Spring Break I had the pleasure of going on a Raider Service Break to the Grand Canyon through the Center for Transformative Undergraduate Experiences. Our group worked with park interpretation, helped to improve people’s experiences of the Grand Canyon by helping them find landmarks and made them aware of all the options that the park has to offer. This is extremely important work that is often overlooked because it tends to be more of a qualitative service than a quantitative. Quantitative services include making 20 fire stacks, mixing 100 pounds of soil, or planting 50 trees. These types of service have effects that are very easily interpreted. Qualitative encounters are extremely important to the experience of the person visiting the park. If there are no volunteers to answer questions, people could wait 15-30 minutes at the visitor center to ask a simple question. This would take precious time away from a vacation that many people plan on taking their entire lives.

The overwhelming majority of the people that I met at the Grand Canyon were phenomenal, kind-hearted people. One man in particular from Canada was one of the nicest people I have met in a long time. I met him at Mather Point, possibly the busiest and most trafficked place in the Grand Canyon that is not the Visitor Center, when I offered to take a picture of him and his wife. He happily gave me his phone and I took a picture that captured his family vacation to one of the Wonders of the World perfectly. He was very pleased with the picture and we started talking about where we both came from. He was telling me about the logistical nightmare that it is to go to the Grand Canyon from a foreign country, but all the while he said it with no negativity in his voice and a large smile on his face. He told me that he had waited fifty-six years to see the canyon and that day was his day. Out of all the days in his lifetime this was the day and I was there to experience it with him. His positivity and story resonated with me because I was tired from working the day before and waking up early for our daily information sessions, but this encounter helped me see why I was there very clearly.

There was no excuse to give anything less than my best effort to help these people because many of them had done so much to get to this place. The impact is a lasting one because it reinforced the concept of giving one hundred percent effort into any task that I was doing. It does not matter whether it is helping people or bettering myself, anything worth doing is worth doing well.

This trip has truly been a transformative one for me. Since I have been in town I have been pursuing and becoming involved in community service in Lubbock. A major partner that I plan to volunteer with is the Lubbock Animal Shelter. I went out there with HOSA, a medical student society, and walked a dog named Heeler. He was a very good boy that did not know how to walk on a leash very well. The shelter has so many dogs that are kind hearted, but they have been hardened by their situation. The shelter simply does not have enough staff to help all of the dogs that they have there. This realization impacted me and helped me consider them in my everyday life because a few hours of my time can go a long way at their shelter. This is the same for almost all other nonprofits in the community. Many other places are struggling to do all that they can with the money and funds that they have, just like the National Park system.

The experience of working with the Grand Canyon in the National Park system was very eye opening one for me. They do not have anywhere near the staffing or funding that I believed that they did. Throughout the week we learned more and more about problems facing the park. I never would have known without this trip because from the outside looking in the parks are smooth running machines that do not seem to have many problems that are not related to visitors. When I go home to El Paso in the summer I plan on volunteering at Franklin Mountains State Park because of this experience. Every time I have been there, they do not have many park rangers and some of the trails need maintenance. This would be a great way to give back to a place that I went to many times during my days as a Scout in El Paso, Texas.

The biggest question that this trip has made me ask myself is what do I not know about in my community, who needs help, and what else could I be doing to help. An example of my lack of knowledge in the community of Lubbock is homeless rates. I know that Lubbock has a large homelessness population, but not once have I gone to a shelter to get more information and seeing how I can help this population of people that have been ignored by most, including myself, for so long. I plan to change this very soon. There are so many groups that could use more support from the community, but many people do not know who these organizations are. Now that I am more aware of volunteering opportunities, I will actively search them out. Apart from becoming knowledgeable about who needs help, a vitally important question is how can I help them. I plan to accomplish this by going to different community partners and asking them how I can be of service to them.

This trip was a phenomenal experience where I met many great people from my University and people from all around the world. The volunteering was impactful, rewarding, and genuinely fun. I do plan on doing this trip again if it happens next year. The trip was a great way for me to see a wonder of the world for the first time while concurrently helping others. It has also made me think about how I can be a better citizen in my community through helping those that may need me.

-Scott Gibbens