An unexpected place of service

I’m trekking across a dessert wasteland in Kenya; Malaria nets strapped to my back and jugs of purified water weighing me down. Sweat pools on my forehead and drips down into my eyes. I can’t stop though. I must get these supplies to the village before nightfall or some innocent child will die. 
This is what expected when I signed up for my mission trip. 
Well, maybe I’m romanticizing things a bit, but you get the point. I expected to travel to some third world country—someplace where I would get the chance to help people. To really make a difference in the world. And then I was assigned to, drumroll please… 
San Francisco. 
Yes, that’s right. San Francisco, California. Land of the Golden Gate Bridge and the championship Giants. 
I thought I must be mistaken. I had been to San Francisco on vacation. What sort of work could I possibly do there? 
Actually, a lot. 
I visited the Tenderloin District. A place named so because back in the day, the police made so much money off of the crimes committed in the area that they were able to purchase tenderloin steaks. 
During my week stay, I witnessed numerous drug deals transacting in broad daylight, cripples and old women fighting over food from a dumpster and the largest pile of human excrement I have ever seen (and hope to never see again) amongst other acts of violence and desperation. 
There was no more denying it. I was in a bad area. This wasn’t the Ghirardelli Square I’d visited with my family. This was the inner city and I was witnessing things I had hoped didn’t exist in this world. 
But I also saw hope. 
I saw it in the dedication of the workers at the Food Bank who helped us package over thirty thousand pounds of food to be distributed throughout the city in a matter of hours. Who, as we exited the building patting ourselves on the back for our day of service, called out to the manager over their shoulders that they’d be back next week. 
I heard it in the cheerful tone of Rochelle, the manager at the low budget Mercy Housing where we distributed the food from the Food Bank, as she stopped to chat with each and every tenant even though seven different languages were spoken in her building and she only new English. 
I felt it in the press of lips to my hand as an old Russian man who lived in the Mercy Housing thanked me for walking the food we’d packaged for him, probably the only food he’d get all week, into his cramped apartment. 
And I walked it as two six-year-olds from the Tenderloin Boys and Girls Club were able to guide me through the inner city along a yellow path while drug dealers and gang members moved aside. Moved aside because they new that these children were the hope of their city. 
I saw a lot of bad things when I visited the Tenderloin. Many things I wish I could erase from my memory to shield myself from just how awful the world can be. But I’ll keep those memories if it means I can also keep the ones of the good people who live amongst the criminals and of the tireless workers who grew up in the Tenderloin and stayed. Stayed because they knew there was work to be done in their city. 
So when my week was done, and I was heading back to my comfortable life in my little beach town if Carlsbad, California, I didn’t feel like I usually do after a service project—like the little hole I’d dug out with my service was about to be filled right back in as soon as I left. I knew that it would continue to grow because I was leaving it in capable hands.