Learning Trust and Creating Meaning Through Serving Others

When Mark Lauer arrived at SUWS to work as an instructor, the desolate beauty of the desert landscape gave him a sense of awe. In central Idaho, the mountains drop off into the Bennett Mountain plateau, giving way to high desert. To the north were rocks and canyons; he stood in the midst of a sagebrush ocean. But he was not distracted by the sheer beauty of the place. Within the first thirty minutes of arriving there, he had spotted 4 great horned owls, as well as short-eared owls, coyotes, and other wildlife.

He came to teach wilderness and primitive living skills. Later he built a ropes course as well. Through teaching the skills needed to survive in the wilderness he hoped to help students learn to persevere and become self-reliant, as well as to create meaning rather than just pleasure in their lives. The lessons learned in acquiring wilderness skills, once mastered, he predicted, would cross over to the daily lives of the students back in their urban settings, allowing them to meet the challenges at home and school more successfully.

He believes three things need to happen for change in a student's life to occur. The program has to get through to a place where the student has a desire to change; it has to break through the initial sense of what is happening to get students to recognize responsibility for what they need to do and to wake up to the possibilities in their lives, and to what is happening around them; finally, the students need an opportunity to try out the skills they have been learning.

Many students come to the program upset and angry, and blaming others for their problems, which range from failing in school, to using drugs, to alienating their families. SUWS helps them to see what is valuable in themselves, and to build on that value, by learning new skills, and returning to a sense of underlying trust in themselves and others, that allows them to achieve a new level of independence and right decision-making in their lives.

The students participate in truth circles, where one person gets to talk at a time, holding a power object that allows them to hold the floor uninterrupted. These truth circles allow students to talk through their sense of pain and to hear and be heard by the other students. The release of pent-up anger or frustration allows them to move beyond that block to creative thinking and to realize the desire to change that lies within them. Once the desire to change and improve their lives has surfaced, the students are ready to recognize responsibility for what they need to do, and to learn new skills. The process of learning these skills teaches them a process that they can apply to many situations in their lives. This process involves awakening and implementing a sense of awareness and attention to details, patience, recognition of the major goals of the exercise or skill, and the persistence and perseverance to get the job done.

Defining the qualities of persistence and perseverance allows them to be learned experientially, as a part of the process of learning wilderness and primitive living skills. The Wright brothers tried hundreds of times to get their plane to take off in the same way from the same location, waiting for just the right conditions. That is persistence. Eventually they succeeded, and the world of transportation was changed forever. Thomas Edison tried hundreds of different ways to conduct electricity to create usable light. That is perseverance. Eventually he succeeded, and gave electrical lighting to the world. These attributes, persistence and perseverance, rather than talent or innate ability alone, allow human beings to meet the most severe challenges in their lives. SUWS recognizes the need for students to discover these attributes in themselves and apply them to the challenges they face.

Mark talks about the usefulness of learning a particular skill well, not only for itself but also because it serves as a metaphor and reference point for other learning situations in the students' lives. Learning to make a fire with a bow drill involves a series of steps, each of which must be done right, for the process to succeed. "You have to know how to use a file, how to cut the bow from a willow branch, how to make the right arc, tie a few knots. You have to pick the right wood - not too rotted - choosing decent materials. Then you have to work on technique: push the spindle in to the fireboard, and thread the spindle. Threading the spindle is very difficult initially. Then you have to work on bowing, then on speed, and judging the pressure. The last and most important piece is that if you don't believe you can make a fire this way, it won't happen. You have to believe you can do it."

How a student learns to use the bow drill to build a fire becomes a metaphor and a training ground for how the student approaches relationships. The life skill, the metaphor that Mark gets the students to see, is that ultimately, in life, if you don't believe you are going to succeed at home, you won't." Mark says the student must learn to say to him or herself, "If I avoid the bow drill I won't get better; if I avoid my relationships at home, they won't get any better. When I engage powerfully in my world, amazing things happen." In the end, the fire, or the successful relationship, is its own reward.

The ropes course is a metaphor of how the student approaches his or her life. Mark notes that some people are so enthusiastic to get going that they forget about their partner. The neglect demonstrates to students the effects that their actions can have on the people that are closest to them. Some people don't even leave the ground, because they are so fearful. Mark works with these students to practice falling on the ground, so they can feel how it might be when they take a fall from up on the ropes. There is value in what they are doing even if they never do that particular exercise again; how they do it is what is important. They see how much they progress, how much determination they gain, as well as gaining experience in trouble shooting. "Sometimes you have a great sense of their progress. A kid will start out shrieking and crying, but they begin this process of moving through their fear. By the end they are laughing, falling, working with their partner. . . . Some beautiful learning happens there, when you are thirty feet up in the air and the only person you can rely on is your partner. Trust is built on it."

Finally the students are given opportunities to try their new skills at a deeper level, one involving not only initiative and team building, but also serving others, the whole concept behind "Search and Rescue". In this exercise, students go on a call to respond to a difficult situation that another, less experienced group is facing, for example, a group which is struggling emotionally. They are called upon both in real situations, and in some situations that the instructors set up to test them, but the students are not told which ones are real, so that they learn to approach all situations with their best efforts. Through this exercise, they get a chance to help others. The ultimate goal of this experiential learning, implemented in these opportunities, is to help the students gain new patterns of creating meaning in their lives through serving others.

Mark asks himself continually, "How do we help them to challenge themselves, how to have a mission and tap into the part of them that wants to serve, wants to help others?" He continues, "I don't think it is the stuff that we say. It is the experience of how it feels when they help somebody. . . . This is an opportunity to get reconnected to our mission, to the understanding that we are here to leave the world a better place."

He sees that the students need to connect the present challenge that he gives them with trust issues that they face at home or school. Instructors and therapists at SUWS help them to understand that they need to be attentive and responsive to the relationships themselves, in order to trust the right amount. With some persons in your life, you trust very little, with others a lot. The instructors ask themselves, "How do we catch them doing the things that will help them to be successful when they return to home or school and face a problem or a crisis?" The therapist helps reconnect them to the system to which they are returning.

Mark adds an insight he has gained from his sixteen years of working with SUWS. "When somebody problem solves, they learn from their mistakes. They learn to say to themselves, 'be careful not to let go of this or you'll lose it'. That learning gets [imprinted] somewhere in his or her brain, so that the student thinks, 'These are the three top things I need to do, when I face a crisis.' That is the learning that the kids walk away with. What we are doing is a rite of passage." This rite of passage will enable SUWS students to transition to a more mature and successful set of responses to their home and school environments, based on awareness and caring for themselves and others.

Despite the lure of pleasure inherent in any environment, the returning student who has learned from the program will not be distracted. Just as Mark noticed the great horned owls and other wildlife present in the desert environment, he or she will notice the challenges, possibilities and dangers in each life situation, and will have the skills to learn how to deal with them in ways that add to his or her life, rather than detracting from it.