Another American Adventure: volunteering

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

volunteering

Today I volunteered. I'm not really a volunteer-er, but I wanted a way to connect with local people. So I went with a group from the local Catholic Church to a place called "World Vision". It was a warehouse up on a hill near Pittsburgh. For 3 hours we opened boxes of books (donated by the major stores) and sorted them according to language and type, and then re-boxed them and coded the boxes. It was tedious, robot-like work. After 3 hours on my feet my back hurt and I wondered whether children in Africa needed books that no one in America wanted to read. (They were 90% Christian devotional books, none of which interested me.) But I did feel a lot more connected to the people I volunteered with, and empathy for the people work in factories all day.

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"In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their skin was thinnest.

"The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753, and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along Lake Erie for two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.

"Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina parakeets - red, green, and yellow - nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees' trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves - but no one heard any of this, no one at all."

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.