Make a Difference Day

If Overwhelmed do following

1. Start with garbage bag and clean out fridge of rotten food and old debris. Pick up obvious garbage and food products around kitchen and living space. All surfaces. The more garbage is picked up, the better sorting will go. Be careful of receipts, Rx information, or bills. Ask resident before throwing away if looks iffy.
2. Do dishes in sink. Drain nasty water first, start with clean water.
3. One person can do bathroom, sort like things together, throw away trash. Let tub soak in cleanser.
4. Change gloves often and take trash out as it fills.

I thought that the smell could have been in my head. The smell in Adria’s car of old leather and young friends, of English pubs and American greasy spoons, of college parties and high school barbeques may have been something I imagined. And why shouldn’t it have been? Why wouldn’t I imagine the beautiful smoky smell after the putrid odors of the last 2 hours?

Next I noticed the tiny gray flakes. It could have been dust. It could have been stains left by the car’s previous owner. And even if I was right, I didn’t want to be the one to say anything.

The stress level in the car, while neither unfriendly nor hostile had become palpable.

The smell of the apartment we had just left lingered in our noses. The parts of our body that had been exposed to the rancid air in that tiny residence felt as if they couldn’t be cleaned with an hour under a hot shower and an entire bar of Zest deodorizing soap.

Finally, the cruel still of the moment was broken. Adria said exactly what was secretly on all of our minds.

“I have never wanted a cigarette so badly in my life.”

I reached in to my gray fleece Washington Service Corps vest and pulled out a pack of Parliament Lights.

The mood of the car shifted from edgy discomfort to profound relief.

So we lit our cigarettes. We cleared our lungs of the air contaminated by rotting eggs, rotting milk, and rotting pizza crusts; by dog shit and laundry left unwashed for months, possibly years, and thousands upon thousands of bugs.

As the warm, sweet smoke began washing me, cleansing me from the inside out like Russian Lump incense purifying a confessional where the most egregious of human sins has been forgiven in the eyes of god and the church, I realized both how stupid I am and what a wimp I am.

In my Americorps grays, with my Americorps smile of idiot optimism I had begun the day with a vision of the Volunteer Chore Service experience resembling an equal mix of friendly old people needing help tying up a month’s worth of Seattle Post Intelligencers for recycling and an episode of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

When flies swarmed out upon the opening of the woman’s door, and when we all nearly gagged at the smell, the contrast between real and imagined life became stark.

Last year, for Make a Difference Day I gave books to kids. This year for Make a Difference Day, I nearly vomited down the rubbish chute of a subsidized apartment building.

Most of the time that we spent working on the woman’s apartment, I was running the nearly 200 lbs of garbage from the apartment to the dumpster. Why? Because I am a wimp. I would try to help with the clean-up inside of the apartment, but I would go back to running the trash because the rancid thickness of the air and my overpowering fear of cockroaches made the inside of the apartment unbearable for fragile little 2-showers-a-day me.

As all newly acquainted smokers do, we all told each other how long we had been smoking and lied about how close each of us was to quitting. We smoked and smoked and calmed our frazzled and confused nerves.

There is a right way to react publicly to a situation such as the one we had just shared, and it was exactly what we did. We were calm, cool, and collected. We were polite and we acted as if this was the sort of thing that we did all of the time.

However, internally the correct reaction to such a situation is much more ambiguous.

Can I feel disgusted, admitting that each time I’ve ever used the word squalor until now has been massive hyperbole? Should I feel guilt about my disgust? Should this reinforce my fear of ever living alone (something I have never done)? What about my fear of growing old? Is my fear of growing old linked in any way to my love of smoking?

I took another drag from my cigarette.

Service, I thought, can’t be about me. It can’t be about MY fears, about MY fragile sensibilities; it has to be about the person being served, or in a truly ideal world, about the service itself.

I lit a second cigarette with the butt of my first.

If service is about the servant instead of the served, the focus is necessarily misplaced. So why do we spend so much time on reflection, or as Jesse once put it with such vulgar eloquence, “developing our members?”

Does engaging students, or ourselves for that matter, in service with so much attention paid to the students’ learning, or our reflection and growth by its very nature cheapen the value of the service?

I shouldn’t use my Make A Difference Day Volunteer Chore Service to grapple with my fear of old age. I should use my service to help an old woman clean her house so that she doesn’t get evicted.

We got back to our home base at Jefferson Terrace. I put out my cigarette and worried about the moral implications of the Americorps and Service Learning foci on reflection. I laughed at the irony, because I knew that I would soon write a reflection essay on the subject.