Feeling Bland

Dear friends, I have not forgotten to keep you updated…it’s just that I’ve been feeling rather bland lately. I often sit and ponder what exciting things I could blog about, but I usually end up with nothing. I mean…some exciting things are coming up, that’s for sure… pee in a bucket day is Thursday, so I’m sure I’ll have a thing or two to write about then. And Ramadan starts next Tuesday, which I also want to expand on soon. But during the week… nothing.

Don’t get me wrong, my job is getting better every day. But to be honest, I don’t really think I like the idea of a job. In fact, I don’t really even like the word “job”. Let’s see here… according to Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary, we’ve got a few options:

a piece of work; especially : a small miscellaneous piece of work undertaken on order at a stated rate; a criminal enterprise; specifically : robbery c: a damaging or destructive bit of work <did a job on him>; 3 a (1): something that has to be done : task (2): an undertaking requiring unusual exertion; 4: plastic surgery for cosmetic purposes <a nose job>.

Now, with the exception of plastic surgery, none of those sounds even remotely interesting. As you can see, the word fun isn’t even included! This is clearly a problem. Every day I wake up around 7:30am, possibly shower, maybe eat breakfast, and walk 40 minutes to work. I arrive shortly before 9am, sit down at my desk, and check my work email and my own email. This is just the first of about one hundred frantic episodes of checking my email throughout the day. As I sit at my desk (which, luckily, has natural sunlight coming from the window), I somehow keep myself relatively busy until about 11am. At this point, I am thoroughly hungry and ready to take my lunch break, but I typically facebook or play minesweeper for another thirty minutes or so, realizing that the later I take lunch break, the less time I’ll have to work after lunch. Lunch is my reward. My magic pill that gets me through the rest of the day… or at least until about 3:30pm. Then the countdown begins, and I start to wonder if I have a good enough reason made up to leave early. Just a little early. (Every bit helps.) Then, if I’m feeling spunky enough, I begin the long walk home. This walk is somehow longer than the walk to work, which is strange because I’m generally more excited about going home.

Once home, I collapse on my bed in the starfish position. It usually takes me about five minutes to realize there’s no time to be wasted laying on my bed. So I get up, help with dinner, and vent with my housemates. This, generally, is my favorite part of the day. We all sit around the dinner table, eat something vegetarian (another complaint for another post), and take turns telling about how ridiculous our day was. Sara and I usually joke about all of our time spent checking email, I usually brag about getting taken out to lunch for the fourth time in a week, we beg Christa to tell us about the old lady named Mavis that works in her office, Kristen generally has some drama going on with stubborn clients while Liza wishes her clients were old enough to talk, and Allison lightens the mood by sharing her day-long conversations about L.L. Cool J. All in all, dinner is the most real and relaxing time of my day. Since it is just that good, it usually lasts over an hour as we sit and debrief the day. Dish washing is kind of a pain, but we all chip in. After that? Too tired to really do anything. So I check my emails a few more times and hit the hay.

I do want to express that my job is picking up in its level of excitement. I had two important meetings today, and both were reassuring and helped to give me some direction for the coming weeks! They want me to volunteer a bunch this month so I can become familiar with the organizations with which I would program groups to do service projects. Fun! I was also encouraged to do music and art with the women of N Street Village – the homeless shelter that Luther Place runs. Now we’re talkin.

So as the clock ticks on to 11pm, it’s time for bed once again, and another day of work will soon begin. It won’t be so long until I post again, since pee in a bucket day is just two days away! Until then…

Love Yourself

So ever since that life-changing personal safety workshop, it seems as though every person in my house has made a sincere effort to befriend each person we meet on the street. This method might be a little extreme in regards to what we were told, but hey! – what’s wrong with a little love for everyone?! So last Saturday, we finished orientation, and me and my housemates had big plans: walk to Giant to get some groceries, check out some Read-in/Speak-out business we saw signs for, and head home to fill up the kiddie pool on the deck and reeeelax! Well if there’s one thing I can tell you, it’s that God will ALWAYS throw you some curve balls, and the path you think lies ahead of you almost NEVER does. So naturally, our delightful walk to the Giant turned into much more than we had expected:

We passed an older African-American man as we walked, and as we had been taught, we made eye contact and energetically said hello! “Good-day, ladies!” he responded just as energetically. And as we walked ahead of him, he began to sing… it was wonderful, bluesy-gospel…better than any old tape, and more sincere than anything I’d ever heard. (My sister taught me how to use “hyperbole” as a literary technique.) This man was SINGIN! We collectively slowed our step so as to take in as much as we could. I began to think it was one of those fleeting moments that just manages to clear your head of all things negative, when suddenly…it turned into even more! We approached a man selling furniture on the side of the street, and there was no way we could stay away. Fortunately, the old man stopped as well. My housemate Christa turned to him and said, “Sir! What a beautiful voice you have!!” And he said “well, thank you!” and proceeded to introduce himself as Earlsun, pull a harmonica out of his pocket, and play/sing us another lovely tune. It didn’t stop there. We felt a monologue coming on, and boy did we receive it: “I’m 77 years old,” he said, “and I’m just now learning what it means to really live. Everyone’s got it all backwards! You’ve gotta learn to love yourself before you can love other people. Cause you see, you can only GIVE what you’ve GOT. So my prayer has become ‘Lord, help me to learn to love MYSELF more so that I’ve got more love to give!'” We stood there in awe, soaking up every word that he said. He went on about how we’re all his granddaughters…all from Mother Earth… and as he talked, I couldn’t help but think how heavenly he looked, dressed all in white with a West Africa colored belt and an Obama pin. The moment was still fleeting, but when Earlsun left, we all felt how much the energy around us had changed. Christa said what we were all thinking: “I learned way more from that than I did from all of orientation.” I suppose befriending people on the streets isn’t so bad after all…

This idea of loving yourself has stuck in my head over the past several days, and as I attended my first day of work at Luther Place Memorial Church today, it stood out once again as not only important, but essential.  I came across some pamphlet about my job that quoted the book of Leviticus (19:33-34): “When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong.  You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself…”  And if we’re not doing a good job loving ourself, that won’t work out so well for the stranger either, now will it?  After settling into my office, my co-worker/boss-type Jack gave me a tour of Luther Place, dishing out history left and right.  The church was founded in 1873 after the Civil War as a memorial.  After Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968, tons of rioting and violence happened in the streets of DC, right outside of Luther Place.  Many churches closed their doors on this mess.  Luther Place kept theirs open, despite the fact that their insurance would not cover anything that resulted from this voluntary action.  From that moment on, Luther Place continued growing in its outreach to the greater community, building up a homeless shelter for women in 1973 and a program to educate youth about homelessness and poverty in 2001 (this is where I’m working) among many other opportunities.  Sounds wonderful, right?  Well, yes, but… Luther Place has been so involved in helping others, that it has forgotten to help itself.  The attendance is dwindling, the building is falling apart, and the staff is going through a difficult time of transition.  It’ll be a challenge, but I’m excited to be brought into this chaos in hopes that I can help provide some stability and strength.  Earlsun gave me just the lecture I needed to prepare for a ministry of outreach through a new focus on INreach!  So keep your eyes and ears open for those fleeting moments…for the bluesy-gospel being sung without hesitation on the streets that were once full of violence and hatred…

WE REPRESENT

L to R: Liza, Christa, Kristen, Sara, Allison, Amanda

Well, I suppose another adventure has begun! I just barely had enough time to recover from camp before getting back on my feet to head to Washington, DC! I’ll be spending the next year here as a volunteer through Lutheran Volunteer Corps. (To learn more about the basics, check out the FAQ page.) In all honesty, I was quite nervous to make this move. I’m not really sure why…I’ve done a lot of adventurous things in my day… but for some reason, moving to an unfamiliar place, living with unfamiliar people, and working a job that I really know nothing about is a little scary.

Monday morning, bright and early, I carpooled up to DC with Matt Smith – another volunteer that I know from a crowd of Lenoir-Rhyne friends. Somehow, my parents, Matt, myself, and all of our stuff for the year was able to fit in my dad’s Toyota Avalon. Shocking, I know. We were some of the first people to arrive on the scene – Luther Place Memorial Church. This was our registration site and location for much of orientation. In addition, this is where I’ll be working all year! It was exciting to start getting an idea of what I’m in for.

Now at this point, I could go through the week and give you exact details of each day of orientation… but I’m not sure you want to read all that. So instead, I’ll try to summarize, making sure to discuss the things that interested me most!

First of all, 106 volunteers gathered in DC for orientation. Only 17 of those 106 are staying in DC for the year; the others will be spread out all around the country. So each morning, after gathering for announcements, we would congregate into our city groups for a little discussion time with our city coordinator. DC’s city coordinator, Charles, is quite a man. I’ll leave it at that. Each day, we had different sessions and workshops based around the three tenets of LVC: intentional community, social justice, and simplicity/sustainability. We even received a tote bag with the tenets screened onto them! Some sessions were better than others, and by the end of the week, we all felt quite tired of lecture-style “workshops”.

Everyone’s favorite workshop, however, was a 6-hour session on Personal Safety and Applied Non-Violence. It was led by Marty, a lady from DC that could kick your ass. Seriously… she could. It was slightly disturbing to spend the day talking about what to do if you’re mugged, assaulted, or harassed, but she somehow made it so pleasant that we continued talking about it for the rest of the week! We began the session by making a list of those people that we often treat as though they’re invisible – janitors, homeless, immigrants, mothers with small kids, obese people, those of another race, etc…the list could go on forever. Then Marty told us that the first step to feeling safe is to befriend and respect those people. She said we need to get to know the people in our neighborhood, including the homeless people. After all, those people living on the streets would be the ones most likely to see an assault and could be the ones to save your life. Then, we talked about an observation circle. Marty said we need to know who’s around us within a 10ft radius as we walk down the street. More specifically, we need to know at least three details about each person (scars, tattoos, and watches are good ones). This awareness will keep you alert and also help you to identify a person later, if an attack were to happen. We were also told we need to take a tour of our neighborhoods and figure out where dead ends are as well as what areas have the most lighting and what times of day. All of these things seem like common sense, but I had never really put much thought into it before! Six hours later, we had sharpened our Aikido moves and increased our confidence…prepared to walk the streets of any big city!

Every evening of orientation, we had a short worship service/reflection on the theme of the day. I ended up playing piano for them all week…an exciting way for me to share my gifts with the community! It was fun to feel like an asset to the group.

It has taken many days for our house to start feeling united. WE ARE THE DIETRICH BONHOEFFER HOUSE…WE REPRESENT!, we yelled at our first gathering. That’s right, the name of our house is – for short – the Bon House. It is comprised of 6 girls, all 2008 college graduates. The house itself is sweet…I’ve heard rumors that it’s the best house of them all! (You can check out pictures and more explanations on the Bon House Page.) Those of us living in the house are pretty sweet too, I’d say. Still, throughout orientation, we had one of the Baltimore houses crashing at our place. Yesterday, our final commissioning and send-off, was an exciting new step for us. We were finally on our own and able to fully move into our rooms! Work starts on Wednesday, and I think we’re ready. We’ve assigned chores, who’s cooking each night, designated a bi-weekly pee in a bucket day (more on that later), and even had a house meeting in a kiddy pool that we put up on our roof deck. If that’s not preparation, I don’t know what is. Any questions about what’s going on over here? Leave me a comment and I’ll blog about it! I can’t write everything…so give me a lead on what I should write…