Once every other week all the way up until the Big Volunteer Week, we will highlight the values of Serve the City (Humility, Compassion, Respect, Courage, Love, Hope). Each value will be represented by different people from diverse cultures, backgrounds, professions and ages.
Today we present a story of Love:
Dedicating oneself to serving is commitment that requires patience and understanding. It’s a commitment that requires more than just that, however. It requires genuine care and interest in the person being served. Chalks Corriette, originally from the West Indies, is a long time volunteer with Serve the City, and cares deeply for everyone he serves.
Not only is Chalks a long time volunteer with Serve the City, but also he’s a veteran of service in general. He’s been helping whomever he can in the community since he was in his teens, and currently is also the President of People to People International here in Brussels.
His dedication to service stems from a place of deep empathy for everyone. “What worries me,” he says, “is how little people in high levels of responsibility remember what it’s like either to be a young person or somebody who’s having difficulties. Because no matter where we are today…most of us have been through a life where we’ve…met people or been in a situation ourselves where we didn’t have something: food, money, you know, we’re a student, or we’re at camp. And then suddenly we just seem to forget, and it’s too easy for people to forget that problems still exist for a lot of people…And also we forget that we’re not all the same, and somehow we assume that everybody has the ability to solve all their own problems, and this is not the case.”
Chalks has volunteered/travelled all over the world, India, China, Brazil, and various places in Africa, and he believes that service is important because “it’s a good reminder that humans need humans, and that humans are important, and that people need to take the time to connect with the people around them…It is really cool when you meet people that you really would not normally have any interaction with and you can learn so much from them that can enrich your life, inform your life.”
He got involved with Serve the City back in 2010, when friends of his invited him to volunteer. He recalls, “I came to help, to see what it was about, and the rest is history. Here I am.” Throughout his service he says that at Serve the City, “for me, the thing that I see as common is that everybody has a big heart. They really do.” What he mentioned also was that “in fact they’re not just showing love for the projects that they’re involved in, they’re able to share that with their colleagues and their peers that they’re working with, and I think that is quite unique.”
At the risk of sounding overly sentimental, love really is a driving force of Serve the City. Chalks explains that “for a lot of people love is a bit of a complex word. People can imagine loving their partner or their immediate family, and they can imagine love for a sport…It’s very hard for them to imagine that they can love someone that they don’t know. And that’s something to get over in people’s heads that there are different types of love and there are different ways in which you can show love without falling in love with the person.”
“Our love for people in society is quite unique.”
Join us for the Big Volunteer Week to meet Chalks and other amazing people!
