How does Service-Learning Affect me?

How does service-learning affect me as a participant?  Particularly coming to Rwanda to install solar panels and other related projects?  It is coming down to this.  

It is seeing with my own eyes how people live in houses with walls of mud and sleeping on a straw matt on a floor of dirt.  It is seeing how people are forced to stop all activities after the sun goes down because there is no light.  It is seeing how a child goes to school in tattered clothes, hungry, and making little progress because the child has no books and exercise books and cannot study in the evening.  It is seeing how people have to walk for hours to charge their mobile phones.  It is seeing how people in the mountains just kilometres from the capital city are cut off from the outside world because there are no buses, no newspapers, no television, and no radio.  It is seeing how people treasure a small transistor radio that costs only a few dollars. 

We can read all about these things from the Internet from a great distance.  But reading and hearing about it is very different from seeing it with your own eyes, and feeling it with your body.  It is no longer a piece of information.  It is now people connected to me, people that I meet, talk to, and actually part of me that are suffering.  

It is also knowing that I can do something for them.  I can help them install solar panels, that can provide them with a small amount of electricity, for lighting, for mobile phone charging, for news and entertainment on a radio, for study, for household, for fellowship.  It is knowing that I can make their lives just a little easier, even only for a few years while the system remains operating.  

I will feel miserable if I don’t do what I can do to help.  Something like that is affecting, changing our students and staff, and all involved.  That is why we keep coming back for more. It is about being human.  One of my favourite teacher recently used the term “humanist”.  It is not a term I commonly use.  But aren’t we all humans?  Shouldn’t we all to be humanists?  Isn't it something God wants us to do?