Last spring, I signed up with Interfaith Hospitality Network to be a mentor. I do not consider myself a religious person, but I don’t think that should matter — IHN is a well-run national organization that does a lot of good in our community. With the help of volunteer congregations, IHN provides housing for homeless families during a period of recovery and helps them transition back to stability. Mentors support the families after they regain housing, helping them navigate life decisions and maintain their independence. Most families that IHN sees consist of single mothers with children.
IHN has not yet been able to find me an appopriate mentee, in part because I asked that I not mentor someone who has significantly more life experience than I do. I simply wouldn’t feel comfortable coaching a 40-year-old woman with four children on how to live! However, the program has recently begun to accept single, childless women, and it’s possible that one of them will be a good fit, or that a young, recent mother will come into the program.
Still, I’ve been active with the organization thanks to my experience with computers. IHN wanted to outfit their two main centers, one in Tremont and one on Warrensville Road, with computers so that the clients could develop computer skills while in residence. However, they didn’t have any computers to spare for the project. Luckily, I had recently happened upon the website of Computers Assisting People, a local non-profit that takes in donated computers and outfits them for other local non-profits. IHN contacted CAP, and CAP provided them with four computers to install at their centers for their clients.
I went in a couple weeks ago to set up the computers in Tremont and did the computers on Warrensville this past week. These are old computers, running Windows 2000, some with only 8-gig hard drives (mon dieu!). One of the computers is the very first computer I ever had all to myself, an IBM Aptiva circa 1998, complete with a four-pages-per-minute Canon printer. It had going on 10 years of dust crowded around its power button, and I had to open the entire case to clean it out. If you ever wonder why IBM stopped making personal hardware, here’s why: the case takes six hands to open, and the screws take Barbie-doll-sized hands to replace. Remember that this computer is a contemporary of the iMac G3, the cute little egg-shaped all-in-one Macintosh in pretty colors. IBM was dead in the water.
The Gateway also has power-button issues in that its button is just plain broken. Apparently these computers weren’t intended to be turned on as many times as they have been. I’ve got the Aptiva working fine, but I’m going to have to MacGyver something up for the Gateway. Still, once on, they run perfectly, and broken power buttons are bupkis when the computers are free.
The next step: work with another volunteer to create a computer-orientation program to teach clients the basics of word-processing and other key job skills. The computers don’t have Office, but they do have WordPad, which will at least get us started. IHN is looking into their options for outfitting the computers with Office, and we’re going to hook them up to the internet if at all possible. Once we get the curriculum down, we’ll probably do instructional sessions once a week, progressing as a family spends their six or so weeks with IHN.
I don’t know exactly what this project will bring, but this is the kind of work I was looking for when I signed up with IHN: hands-on do-gooding, putting my effort where my mouth is, investing time and energy directly into a constructive project that will benefit my neighbors and the Cleveland community as a whole. I will keep you posted on our progress.
I’m a big fan of private effort towards public good. I believe it’s our responsibility to ensure that every individual within our community — local to global — has the opportunity and the means to thrive. This responsibility is personal: one can’t shove it off to charities or the government; one is obligated, by virtue of being human, to use his own hands to maintain and improve the world around him, to the extent of his capacity to do so.
Lofty words; lofty mission. An impossible mission, for the individual? Absolutely not. For the world? Get back to me in, oh, 10,000 years or so.
So as I’ve grown up and learned how to live, I’ve taken myself to task on living according to my principles. I’ve always had a desire to go out into the community and help, but I haven’t always had the guts to do it. For one — and perhaps primarily — face-to-face volunteering isn’t natural or easy for me. I’m an introvert: while I don’t mind interacting with people, it can be exhausting, especially if I’m not performing a specific, limited role, as I do waiting tables.
When it comes to volunteering, going to the Cleveland Foodbank is right up my alley: move stuff, sort stuff, stack stuff — it’s gentle on the introvert’s boundaries, and I get a kick out of, well, moving stuff, sorting stuff, and stacking stuff. But while volunteering at the Foodbank is worthwhile and enjoyable, it doesn’t seem to meet, as above, the extent of my capacity. My capacity isn’t subject to my introversion no matter how convincingly the latter fights to keep me home. I am a capable, passionate, college-degreed individual who can give a lot to the community if only she figures out what her giving style is. That’s the task I set myself to over the past year: find ways to engage, ways that will stretch me a little, ways that echo what’s in my heart.
This past spring, I contacted a couple of organizations through volunteermatch.org. I searched for opportunities that I felt strongly about — working with the impoverished and homeless — and those that could use my skills — specifically, my computer skills. I began training with one organization to be a mentor to homeless women, and I began developing a database for another organization. I have kept in contact with the first organization all this time, but my contact with the latter organization has fallen off in recent months due to the pressures of school — and, yes, the introversion slide. I hope to re-establish my relationship with the latter organization soon, and I’ll write about my experiences in later posts.
What I’ve learned over the past year is that volunteering isn’t about being there all the time for everything in every way you know how. Volunteering is about maintaining your effort to help and improving on it when and where you can. I’ve had to accept that my desire to help clashes with my personality, and I’ve taken it upon myself to learn my way around my inhibitions so that I can help to a degree and in a way that feel right for me. My desire will always be crying for realization, so, in order to live in peace, the only option I have is to turn it into a reality.
November is National Novel Writing Month, and as the month has drawn to a close (uhm, fourteen days ago), that means there’s yet another proto-novel sitting on my virtual shelf, gnawing at my brain, begging to be finished and edited. That also means I have a 50,000-word excuse why my blogging frequency fell off over the past month or so. Handy, isn’t it?
As for what I’ve been doing the past fourteen days — Monday ended my school semester, and instead of hopping into one of the snazzy new bus stops along CSU, I walked west down Euclid, under the Playhouse Square sign and past blocks of Euclid Corridor construction. Walking that stretch of Euclid always reminds me of the old photos from the twenties and the thirties showing trolleys and boxy cars and throngs of pedestrians in what was a city bustling its way to the top of the country’s heap.
Monday, Euclid sported encroaching construction, skinny lanes, treacherous sidewalks, and a smattering of commuters rushing off to Tower City and the train ride home. There wasn’t much bustle, and it wasn’t the weather for bustling. Downtown’s empty streets always make me wonder just how many residential units there are downtown and just how many of them are occupied. I know of only one tiny grocery store down there, and the couple of downtown drugstores I’m aware of close at 8:00 PM! Indicators of absence, I’d say.
When I got to Public Square, commuters were flowing through it from all directions and pouring into Tower City. The trees were decorated for the holiday, warding off the darkness of this end of the year. The Square seemed a focal point not many would see. It’s perplexing to have this space of grand display in a place where only passers-by will catch it, as if the shoulders of Tower City wall off downtown from all it fostered.
Despite downtown’s unbustling surface, the inside of Tower City was bustling, not just with commuters but with actual shoppers. It was the busiest I can remember seeing it. Hey, the mall must do good business to keep so many stores around, including one of only two Body Shops in the Cleveland area (explain that one).
On the ride home on the Rapid, my MP3 player played me Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. You’ve heard this piece before — originally written for organ, transcribed for orchestra, the opening piece in the 1940 Fantasia movie. I recommend listening to it while riding in a car or on a train. Bach couldn’t have gone faster than about 30 miles per hour his entire life, but boy, did he understand locomotion. (I guess he could’ve gone about 120 free falling, but that would’ve been a one-time gig after which he probably wouldn’t have composed anymore.)
If I were Bach, I would’ve written three novels in November, and I would’ve spat them out fully edited and ready for binding. As I am not Bach, I wrote 50,000 words of something that could possibly become a novel-like entity after several more months’ work. Oh well. At least I’m not stupid enough to try free fall just to gain insight into fugue.
