Don’t Sing It; Bring It.
The Ability to Overcome Bystander Effect
October 7, 2019
How many times have you seen news coverage of a natural disaster and thought, “Man, I wish I could help somehow,” only to return to watching your Wednesday night sitcoms, still feeling concern for that affected community, but far enough removed from the situation to put it from your mind? It’s common to have these sentiments and make excuses about how tethers in our lives would make it impossible to ever take off across the country to be a part of something so out of our comfort zones.
Mike Swiderski felt similarly, seeing the trauma of Hurricane Katrina and the Haitian earthquakes loop on screen, wishing there was something he could do, but thinking of too many reasons why he couldn’t. He made excuses until he didn’t want to anymore, until the drive to make a difference was louder than his fears of disrupting the routine. He did this until he realized he could do something, he could stop singing the laments of wanting to act.
He could find a way and he could go.
Mike is originally from San Diego, California, but has lived on the island of Oahu since 1992 and now calls Hawaii home. He had worked with a few other international volunteer organizations before he first worked with All Hands and Hearts on the Nepal project in 2015.
He rubbled every day for six weeks, clearing the remnants of homes from a family’s lot so that they could rebuild with a clean slate. The homeowners would initially be quiet, sad, and overwhelmed, characteristics very atypical of Nepali people, but just by clearing the rubble from their property, volunteers were able to give these homeowners a literal clean slate to rebuild upon. “Even though we couldn’t salvage much, we basically gave them a blank piece of dirt, they were so grateful for that,”
From that project, Mike says he “drank the Kool Aid,” finding himself on project in South Carolina the next year and Ecuador, Peru, Mexico, and Texas in the quick years to follow. He takes the six weeks a year he’s allotted from his job to donate his time to serve in disaster relief. When Tropical Storm Lane came to The Big Island Mike felt differently than he had for other projects. With international programs, the disaster is far, it’s in another community and culture that is apart from his “normal” world. Now it was in his backyard, on another island, but still impacting those who he identifies as neighbors. He was empathetic to the difficulty of rebuilding on an island, the costliness of every sheet of drywall riddled with mold that he had to tear out. To him the work wasn’t very different than other projects, but the proximity to his own backyard gave the work a different tone, a special kinship that he hadn’t felt before.
FOOTNOTES
Photos and article by HR Wright for All Hands and Hearts
