On spring break Jessica Uhlir bit off the head of a crawfish.
But she did it for a good cause. Uhlir, an 18-year-old Brookfield resident who graduated from Riverside-Brookfield High School last week, spent her second straight spring vacation helping to rebuild a church in the tiny town of Pearlington, Miss. that was destroyed along with most of the rest of town by caused by Hurricane Katrina.
As a junior Uhlir was part of a group of area youths that helped take down the badly damaged church. This year a group of 20 area high school students, including five others from RB, returned to rebuild the church.
Uhlir did a lot of the cooking for the group. Someone donated crawfish, a local delicacy. The locals told her it delicious to bite off the head of the fish and suck its juices before throwing the rest of the fish into a pot of boiling water.
“They gave us crawfish to cook, and they made us bite the heads off them and eat them, which was really gross. But I didn’t want to be rude, so I ate one,” said Uhlir. “I pretended I liked it, but I didn’t really like it. It was kind of gross, actually.”
But that ability to adapt to new situations and go beyond her comfort zone is something that Uhlir has learned from volunteer work such as rebuilding a predominantly African-American Baptist church in a tiny town on the Gulf Coast.
“It was just a really good learning experience for me, and I learned to interact with all different types of people and to be able to reach out to all different types of people.”
When she wasn’t cooking, Uhlir laid tile inside the church, painted the outside of the church and shoveled dirt. Although she had never laid tile before, she did it so well that the supervisor of the project said that he would have hired her if she had lived there.
Volunteering is one of the most important parts of Uhlir’s life.
“I like helping other people,” said Uhlir. “It gives me direction in my life through helping other people. Just being able to see that I made a difference in the world. I want to be able to leave a positive mark on the world.”
Her long and deep involvement in volunteer work has earned Uhlir the Landmark’s Citizen Award for graduating seniors.
Uhlir’s volunteer work perhaps has its roots in her religious upbringing. She is a member of Calvary Memorial Church in Oak Park.
“I was raised in a Christian home, and I was always taught to do unto your neighbor as you would have them do unto you,” said Uhlir. “It’s just so beautiful to help complete strangers. That’s what Christianity is about-to reach out to your fellow man no matter who they are.”
Uhlir’s trips to Mississippi, which she helped plan, organize and raise the money for, were sponsored by the Community Extension Project (CEP), a nonprofit youth volunteer organization based in LaGrange that Uhlir first encountered as a seventh-grader at S.E. Gross Middle School in Brookfield.
In eighth grade she organized a toy drive at Gross to collect toys for needy children. She has remained very active in CEP throughout high school and has participated in so many volunteer activities that she can’t even remember all of them.
But she does remember how it makes her feel to help out others.
“It gives me a sense of fulfillment and almost order in the crazy world that we live in,” said Uhlir.
Uhlir wants to make service to others her life’s work. She will attend Augustana College in the fall and plans on becoming a social worker or counselor and thinks she would like to work in a school.
In her four years at RB Uhlir has transformed herself from a rather shy girl who mostly cared about doing well in school into a confident and thoughtful young woman who has broad concerns.
“I think I’ve become a lot more outgoing and open to change and adapting to new environments,” said Uhlir. “Grades are still important to me, but not as much anymore. Now it’s more like volunteering and stuff that’s more important to me. I’ve really got my priorities straight, and I’ve really become open to change.”
