I have just returned from my weekend in Reno, my former home, the region of my first Americorps year, and I am now in the office trying to remember what my job consists of. As I remember, at least part of it is reflection, so I am taking this opportunity to share with you, the rockin'-ist Ameri-team anywhere! During my trip, I was going to visit my old work, the Ron Wood Family Resource Center, to see how things are going. They have grown in the months since I completed my VISTA term, adding staff members and desperately needed services to a semi-rural Nevada community. They have even incorporated the local WIC clinic.
Sadly, several feet of snow prevented my drive from Reno to Carson City, (actually the snow didn't prevent it. The road was open but my personal phobia of sliding off in to a ditch on highway 395 and being frozen in 8 feet of ice until spring did most of the actual Carson-City-visit-prevention.) Despite not being able to actually visit the newly expanded facilities, I did get the chance to talk with my former coworkers. One of the pieces of information that I was just now able to gather was the fact that the person who replaced me as the Service Learning Coordinator VISTA at RWFRC had quit. This took me a bit off guard. I know that a lot of VISTAs do leave. A smaller, but not insignificant number of non-VISTA Ameri-corpses quit too.
Our own team has withered in our first term. Still, I am a little upset, not because someone had the audacity to leave an Americorps position. Damn, that happens. My distress comes from the fact that her leaving marks the near-certain end of projects and programs that I started. As an Americorps, there is a real "if I help one person" mentality. "If Sarah is reading at grade level at the end of the year" or "If I help Beatrice figure out her food stamps so that she has enough to eat" or, "if I can help the McFarland family really prepare for an earthquake" or even in this Campus Connections program, "If I can get Dr. Truehart to include a Service Learning project in her environmental biology class, mine will not be time wasted."
I admit that this is an unfair description of Americorps. There is an element of achieving sustainability in all of our work. But as a VISTA sustainability isn't just an element of the job, it is THE job. So if, six months after leaving the service learning youth team which I created, the team no longer exists, my last year was really a terrible failure.
So what can I take from this?
It was only one wasted year, and I have a shiny new Education Award to show for it, not to mention a resume full of skills in exchange for this 12 month excursion in to dubiously successful do-good-ery.
One option for me would be to just pass blame. I mean, she did quit. It wasn't my fault. I left a "legacy binder" full of "how - to" manuals about further developing the programs I had inherited, maintaining, developing and even redefining those that I had started, and starting new projects as the agency / community needs and her interest arose.
Alternately I could go in to a fit of flagellatory self blame for the unsustainable programs to which I dedicated a year of my life. Or I could just sort of let go of it and be glad that I am currently in a job where I think that my work WILL have a lasting effect and try to convince myself that my disappointment about my work at Ron Wood isn't that big of a deal. I don't really know.
At Pre Service Orientation in Provo, Utah, oh so, so, so long ago, I vaguely remember one of the sessions we took focused on "letting go" of our projects when we left them. Considering the number of VISTAs who do two terms at the same site, or who are hired on to their sites after their terms end, I think that very few of us took that session too seriously. But I think that the point of the session was to allow us to accept the directions that our programs went when we left them, even if they seemed to be executed through methods other than those which we would have used. I wish I had raised my hand to ask, "So what if our program dies after we leave?"
1 comment:
It often takes me a while to read your ridiculous rants, but when i do I find them Meloncholy and Infinitely sad. I did not know you went to provo, which in itself is a rather depressing proposition. Did you know I grew up in Utah? U probably did.
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