Taking the Urban Plunge

 The summer of 2018 I took a big plunge.

I moved to Seattle, Washington, to participate in Serve Seattle, a summer-long internship program for the Union Gospel Mission (UGM).

I brought only a backpack and my suitcase (not even a pillow and blanket, that could be purchased at Goodwill when we got there), and I road tripped 34 hours across the country with my boyfriend at the time, who also was participating in the internship program.

When I got to Seattle, I was greeted by 20 other interns, who would soon become some of my closest friends, from all around the country. We all lived in a giant mansion in the middle of the city.

And when I say mansion, it was a MANSION mansion; it made my sorority house look like a doll house. The Serve Seattle mansion was formerly a monastery and was bought from the group of monks by the UGM. There was a full-functioning church, offices, several living rooms, a record studio, several kitchens, and a gym all inside the house.

Together, all 21 of us would travel around Seattle in vans, handing out supplies and helping those on the streets find shelter and hooking them up with resources. We also each were assigned personal internships; mine was at the shoe distribution program for the UGM.

One element of my summer with Serve Seattle will forever stick with me, however.

Halfway through the program, we participated in an annual learning experience that UGM had dubbed “The Urban Plunge.”

In this Urban Plunge, the interns would have the opportunity to experience homelessness for a day, so we could better understand the people we were working with and serving.

We all were woken from our beds at 5 a.m. and shoved out of the house. We were without our phones, money, maps, our Metro passes, and food. All we were allowed to bring with us were our journals and pens, and we weren’t allowed to return to the Serve Seattle house until 10 p.m. that night (a full 17 hours without food or shelter).

We were split up into groups of four, with a boy in every group except for mine. 

When my group left the house in the morning, we didn’t know where to go, so we walked around the perimeter of the city, which took us until noon. By that time, we started to get hungry, so we trekked to Pike’s Market for free cherry samples from the fruit stands. After that, we laid under the Space Needle. Without our phones or watches, however, it was hard to tell how long we had been in a particular place.

For the day, we had also been given a list of tasks that we needed to complete, things that a real person suffering from homelessness would struggle to accomplish on a day-to-day basis. These things included finding a place to sleep that would accommodate women, a place to do laundry, and a place to theoretically charge our phones.

In the afternoon, we attempted to accomplish these tasks, although we failed at most of them. We managed to find a place to charge our phones at the public library, but we didn’t find a place where we could sleep or clean ourselves up.

We returned to the house at 10 p.m. and devoured a large plate of chocolate chip cookies that our leaders had prepared for us.

However, even though the day of the Urban Plunge was over, the lessons we would take from it had just begun.

The Urban Plunge woke me up to my own privilege. Our Urban Plunge was rough – we didn’t eat, we didn’t have a place to rest, and our feet hurt from walking – but we only did this for 24 hours. There are people in the world who do this every single day, some since they were a child.

And even though our day was a struggle, because of what we looked like, we still experienced privilege. A person who was really struggling from homelessness would not have been given free cherry samples, would not have been allowed to nap under the Space Needle, and would have to constantly face the stares of passerbys.

Even as I returned home from Seattle to my comfy home in Vermillion, I noticed a huge attitude inside myself. The plunge I took in the summer of 2018 taught me to be okay with where I’m at in my life, and taught me how to see others’ struggles from a different perspective.