Slowing Down yet Speeding Up

Author’s Note: The following events were written as they were occurring. As such, they were written in the appropriate tense at that time. The following events occurred on January 9, 2019. In addition, I present information which I may or may not agree with in this piece.

Robert Coles (1993) briefly informs readers of The Call of Service that the word “volunteer” comes from the Latin word “Velle,” which means “to wish” (p. 85). Today however, would end up with a realization that some of the things I wished for this trip will most likely remain just that, a wish. However, through the small contributions I have done with Rebuilding Together these past couple of days, I am contributing to the wish of bettering New Orleans and the local community through volunteerism.

It is starting to become a routine, but I woke up just before 6:00 AM, got out of bed, changed into my work clothes, ate a light breakfast, and packed my lunch along with the rest of the class as we boarded our cars. At some point during my morning routine, one classmate said that she likes me. That was a surprise but thank you so much for making my day! Today was my turn to sit in the middle seat of the Chevy Suburban my half of the class took to and from the worksite (and other destinations) daily for the past few days now. We left Saint Jude (SJ) at 7:00 AM and grabbed coffee and other drinks at Fair Grinds coffee shop near Esplanade Avenue. While the majority of my class mates ordered their fair-trade coffee, I decided to order some Greek yogurt and Italian soda. I enjoyed my soda, but my yogurt tasted slightly better than cardboard: appetizing. We had plenty of time before we needed to arrive at our work site in the Seventh Ward, so some students visited a nearby market and stockpiled potato chips for later. Once we were all together, we headed down Esplanade Avenue and arrived at our site around 9:00 AM where we met with our AmeriCorps supervisors and quickly got to work with scrapping old paint off of everything, and even priming.

I continued working on my window from yesterday, continuing to scrape as much old window glaze as I possibly could before getting frustrated. The unfortunate reality is that some of the glaze is too stubborn to remove, so I focused my attention elsewhere by scraping more paint off of the window frame, which still had a sizable amount of paint on it. I was not able to get as much off as I would have liked, although I persisted and was able to get more off as I tried different spots across the frame.

I was getting more burnt out today due to a lack of sleep the prior night and becoming somewhat impatient with the process. Instead of taking one small break prior to lunch, I took two today. These small breaks gave me some time to clear my head, drink water, and focus on some other things, thus giving me some newfound energy, which allowed me to do a better job at scrapping more and more paint from the window frame. I think I made more progress today, but I still felt some self-imposed pressure to succeed and do a perfect job. I continued working until 12:00 PM when our class stopped working and enjoyed lunch. I sat further away from everybody today and took some time to get to know my AmeriCorps supervisors better. I asked them questions about what they like to do during their free time, learning that Ben likes to Bike, and Tristan likes to run near the river. During this time, I asked the AmeriCorps team about our progress to which they revealed that we were ahead of schedule. Today was only Day Three and we already started priming. I also met with one of my classmates to discuss preliminary ideas for our in-class facilitation tomorrow, coming up with a structure for how we are going to do it and some ideas for what questions to ask and when. While we were discussing our facilitation on the Smith’s porch, Mrs. Smith came by and we introduced ourselves to her. I learned that Mrs. Smith has family in the San Francisco Bay Area and that California “is five years ahead of Louisiana” when it comes to technology (Personal Communication). Mrs. Smith insisted that we call her by her first name and offered my classmate and I hot chocolate. While we initially said yes, we ended up declining the offer for today as we needed to get back to work.

I continued working on my window and somehow got comfortable enough with the people I was working with to the point where I started telling jokes and even improvising some songs. I changed up the lyrics of “working on the railroad” to “working in New Orleans” and got a couple laughs. Another classmate complemented my singing voice, which those who know me best will tell you is off-key. A couple others complemented me on doing a great job even though I would beg to differ.

I decided to title this piece “Slowing Down and Speeding Up” in order to refer to the overall speed my class has had with repairing the Smith Residence while I personally felt that my performance was going down the toilet. It’s amazing to look back and see how far everyone has come and the incredible results a group of 12 Chapman Students, two Professors, and four AmeriCorps members have made in three days. In addition, through our volunteer work, we were fulfilling the Smith’s wish of providing them with a repaired home to live in and pass down for generations to come.

Once 3:15 PM hit, I concluded my work for the day and began packing up my tools and supplies. I assisted the rest of the class with putting their ladders away and wrapping up the plastic sheets we used to contain the lead paint chips. I also helped sweep the driveway of lead paint chips in order to minimize environmental damage and health risks from lead paint. At 4:00 PM, after what seemed to be an eternity, we left the work site and headed back to SJ to meet for our class session.

Today’s class discussion was on frustrations one experiences and how we can re-frame those frustrations into positives. This is something I am all too familiar with as every now and then, I replay this memory I have from December 2017 when I got lunch with a friend of mine and said “if I could do it all over again, I would have tried hanging out with you more” to which she said “That’s okay, we can get lunch in the Fall when you return from Japan and you can tell me all about it!” Of course, that never actually happened, we met once in May for lunch and didn’t bump into each other again until November but hey, that’s life. Back to the main point. Many of the frustrations the class had were related to scrapping paint, but the class was reminded of how important this minuscule work was. For this exercise, I expressed my frustration of going so slow to which one of my classmates told me that I was still making progress, which is a much more positive way of looking at it.

We then watched part three of When The Levees Broke, which focused on the social impacts of Katrina. The documentary showed news clips describing the Hurricane victims as “refugees” and how many of these people, who were mostly black, were separated from their families and scattered across the nation. There were clips of some activists and academics, such as Michael Eric Dyson, who claimed that this was a race issue. There was even a clip of Kanye West on the news stating that “George Bush doesn’t care about Black People.” Other clips showed families, who understandably felt unwelcome in their home city of New Orleans, resettling in places such as Utah and Texas, restarting their lives and taking advantage of better opportunities (to be clear, I don’t mean this in a derogatory way. It’s good to take advantage of any opportunity you get). Part Three concluded with a mother burying her five-year-old daughter who drowned. The class then discussed how Kanye’s attitudes shifted over the course of the past 14 years from denouncing George W. Bush for “not caring about Black People” to supporting Trump, whom many regard as racist. Class concluded shortly after with a discussion on some positive changes that occurred Post-Katrina.

As dinnertime was fast concluding, my classmates made plans to go to Frenchmen Street to attend a Jazz performance. While I was invited to tag along, I decided not to due to ever increasing anxiety and cynicism. Why? Today was such a great day, one of my classmates said she likes me. Why would I shy away?

Part of it was to prepare for my facilitation tomorrow and another part was to recharge my batteries. However, my cynicism got a better hold of me at this time. I started to see being friends with my classmates as a sham. This is something I have seen time and time again in recent years; I would attend some program of sorts with the expectation that I’m going to make friends with everybody and end up leaving with never keeping contact with anyone ever again. This occurred to me while in Japan, during Freshman Year of Chapman, and during other points in my life. When coming on this trip, I was hesitant to call anyone friends because of this expectation but things seemed so different. I currently do not think that I will hang out with the people I met on this program. About one-third of students will graduate in the Spring and the rest I will not see again (most likely). I’m struggling to spin this one into a positive as historically speaking, I am right. With that, only time will tell. However, I finished my reading in preparation for my facilitation and wrote a rather detailed journal/blog about what happened today, so there’s that!

But as The Strokes said in their song “Alone, Together,” “Things they have changed in such a permanent way.” Let’s see what Day Six brings!