The bright, cold sunlight of 7am February 22nd dawned on two vanfuls of St. Joseph Workers, packed to the overhead lights with snacks and sleeping bags. We traveled in caravan for 12 hours that first day, finally ending in St. Louis, MO, where we were fed and put up for the night in a lovely old convent building. The next morning we set out again, this time for New Orleans, to begin our week of service with Operation Helping Hands, an organization sponsored by Catholic Charities.
Operation Helping Hands is dedicated to rebuilding and refurbishing houses destroyed in the flooding that destroyed the city when the levees broke in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Their website describes their work this way, "Operation Helping Hands brings volunteers from across the country together to help rebuild New Orleans by rebuilding homes of elderly, disabled or uninsured homeowners."
We were joined in New Orleans by six other women, three each from worker programs in Philadelphia and New Orleans, as well as three staff members from those programs and a fledgling program in Albany. You can find photos of the group below . . .
We spent about half of our stay working with OHH painting houses in the Gentilly neighborhood. It felt good to be outside, to be making visible progress on our various projects, to be filling a truly demonstrable need. Some of us got the chance to visit with the homeowners we were helping.
On the one rainy day of the week my group was sent to scrape the rust from the chain link fence that surrounded a one-story mocha and cream bungalow. The task was repetitive and tiring in the way that boring and simple things often are: grasp scraper handle firmly, rasp at the rust only each link, trail a finger down the metal to see if you've made any difference at all. Repeat. We were all grumbling mutinously by mid-day, which was when the homeowner made her first appearance. She had been out shopping for a specific brand of direct-to-metal paint to cover the sanded off rust-coat on the fence when we finished scraping.
We chatted with her for a bit. She showed us a little baggie of paint chips that she had saved from the facade of her house and stored in her purse. She planned on showing them to the supervisor of this project, hoping that he would have something that could come close to a match. We admired the colors and tried to talk about painting metal fences like we knew anything at all about it.
The day before during our dinner table reflection, Marilaurice Hemlock, one of our program supervisors, had mentioned that she felt frustrated while she was working on the house assigned to her group. She said that many of the tools she would have used if she had been painting her own house were missing. The power washer, the paint sprayer, a truly thorough scraping and priming job - all these were not in evidence when they began their work on the house. So she picked up a wet rag and a brush and set to work wiping down the siding by hand, painting as carefully as she could, treating the house, she said, as if it were her own house, and these were the tools she had at hand. At the time I didn't appreciate that commitment fully - I thought that I was doing a pretty good job on the house we were painting. I didn't have a lot of experience, and I was muddling through, whatever. Somehow meeting this homeowner snapped that comment back into the front of my mind, though. Here I was, presented with a task a monkey could do perfectly, and I was slacking. I was scraping, all right, but I was doing it more to have my body in motion than to do a really excellent job. Unlike the house painting we had done the previous days, scraping the house didn't allow me to excuse my half-hearted application with a claim to lack of expertise. Scraping rust off of chain link is not something that you need to be trained to do well. You just either do it thoroughly or you don't.
That moment was a flashpoint in the week for me. There's a chasm of difference between doing something like it's your job and doing something like it's your passion. I was approaching the work like it was service to a distant neighbor, when I should have been thinking of it, as Marilaurice said, as service to myself.
Operation Helping Hands is dedicated to rebuilding and refurbishing houses destroyed in the flooding that destroyed the city when the levees broke in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Their website describes their work this way, "Operation Helping Hands brings volunteers from across the country together to help rebuild New Orleans by rebuilding homes of elderly, disabled or uninsured homeowners."
We were joined in New Orleans by six other women, three each from worker programs in Philadelphia and New Orleans, as well as three staff members from those programs and a fledgling program in Albany. You can find photos of the group below . . .
We spent about half of our stay working with OHH painting houses in the Gentilly neighborhood. It felt good to be outside, to be making visible progress on our various projects, to be filling a truly demonstrable need. Some of us got the chance to visit with the homeowners we were helping.
On the one rainy day of the week my group was sent to scrape the rust from the chain link fence that surrounded a one-story mocha and cream bungalow. The task was repetitive and tiring in the way that boring and simple things often are: grasp scraper handle firmly, rasp at the rust only each link, trail a finger down the metal to see if you've made any difference at all. Repeat. We were all grumbling mutinously by mid-day, which was when the homeowner made her first appearance. She had been out shopping for a specific brand of direct-to-metal paint to cover the sanded off rust-coat on the fence when we finished scraping.
We chatted with her for a bit. She showed us a little baggie of paint chips that she had saved from the facade of her house and stored in her purse. She planned on showing them to the supervisor of this project, hoping that he would have something that could come close to a match. We admired the colors and tried to talk about painting metal fences like we knew anything at all about it.
The day before during our dinner table reflection, Marilaurice Hemlock, one of our program supervisors, had mentioned that she felt frustrated while she was working on the house assigned to her group. She said that many of the tools she would have used if she had been painting her own house were missing. The power washer, the paint sprayer, a truly thorough scraping and priming job - all these were not in evidence when they began their work on the house. So she picked up a wet rag and a brush and set to work wiping down the siding by hand, painting as carefully as she could, treating the house, she said, as if it were her own house, and these were the tools she had at hand. At the time I didn't appreciate that commitment fully - I thought that I was doing a pretty good job on the house we were painting. I didn't have a lot of experience, and I was muddling through, whatever. Somehow meeting this homeowner snapped that comment back into the front of my mind, though. Here I was, presented with a task a monkey could do perfectly, and I was slacking. I was scraping, all right, but I was doing it more to have my body in motion than to do a really excellent job. Unlike the house painting we had done the previous days, scraping the house didn't allow me to excuse my half-hearted application with a claim to lack of expertise. Scraping rust off of chain link is not something that you need to be trained to do well. You just either do it thoroughly or you don't.
That moment was a flashpoint in the week for me. There's a chasm of difference between doing something like it's your job and doing something like it's your passion. I was approaching the work like it was service to a distant neighbor, when I should have been thinking of it, as Marilaurice said, as service to myself.
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