Now that I've gotten started at work, I can start to at least draw outlines of what I'll be doing this year. I've been given my assignments, which touch on early childhood development, after school literacy tutoring, evening arts programs, and a community thrift shop. So far, I've gotten to spend the most time working with Martha, who created the Education and Youth Services department (which used to be a part of the Advocacy department) pretty much from scratch on her own, as far as I can tell. She's also been pretty much running it on her own up until now, so right now my main challenge is to figure out her system and help her prepare for when the students come while she adjusts to not having to do EVERYthing on her own. So far, my favorite part is that she either explains what I should be doing for the next 90 seconds or in 3 weeks, so when she gets a phone call or pulled away, I get to fill my time reading ("sorting") the children's books we have for the tutoring and mentoring programs. Quite enjoyable. Once the program gets started (school is only just begun, so they have a little time to get settled in), it looks like I'll be administering and organizing the pretests of the students and the progress reports from the tutors, checking up with parents of students who are tardy or absent (Martha has very strict rules about attendance to teach the students - and parents - the importance of respecting a schedule and commitments) as well as tutoring about 6 students myself. I'm sure once I start working with students, the reality of the daunting task of bringing half a dozen students from reading below grade level, which I never experienced in the course of my education, to the desired grade level will set in, but for now I'm mostly nervous about calling the mothers and discussing any delinquencies or attendance issues. Presumably they all speak Spanish, but some of the families in the neighborhood come from parts of Mexico where indigenous languages are still spoken in the homes and on the streets, meaning many speak Spanish as a second language and therefore their Spanish may not be any better than mine! Xabier, another volunteer in the house, is teaching a Spanish class for individuals in this situation, so that they can learn Spanish properly as a first building block to learning English. Free English classes are easy to find, but few organizations offer Spanish literacy courses like the one offered at the agency.
I'll fill in more details on that as they come, but another project Brittany and I have been working on is finding a church. SO MANY churches in the city have dynamic young adult groups and participation, which is pretty exciting because based on churches I've attended at home, I was anticipating a "donut hole" of activities between children and youth oriented programs and programs oriented toward married individuals and families. Last Sunday, we attended a church in the neighborhood, mostly out of convenience of location, but were dismayed to find it's message exceptionally divisive (apparently, hospitality need not extend to people working against the mission of God, ie we need not welcome Mormons, Catholics, or Jehovah's Witnesses into our homes or say "God bless you" to them as a farewell). Fortunately, we had heard from some Jesuit Volunteer Corps volunteers that a church on the Upper West Side has a jazz-themed Sunday evening mass, so we met them there the same evening. It was so fabulous; some songs were traditional songs rearranged in a jazz style, others were traditionally jazz songs of particularly uplifting theme. Also, I feel like it's been a while since I've seen a church as full and such a large number of individuals in attendance clearly under the age of 40. At a time when so much is made of how the church is dying and young people aren't interested in organized religion, this church seems to know how to keep open and welcoming (without watering down the message, I might add; although the style was modern, the order of service was traditional and the homily challenged casual interpretation of the day's scripture). This evening, we went to a young adult talk series. The speaker this week was Sr. Elizabeth Johnson (I believe; I'm so bad with names and there were no signs!), a professor at Fordham University in the Bronx speaking about the place of women in the Catholic church. She covered traditional arguments supporting the current place of women in roles other than as priests or a part of the formal hierarchy, then looked to scripture and the reality of the church from the 1st century into the 11th or beyond where women held formal roles of authority and power that were sometimes stripped away or reduced to minimize the differences between Christian society and the patriarchal societies that surrounded it. As I've seen women as leaders in the church for as long as I can remember (although at not in equal numbers), this discussion struck me as completely pointless. How much time has been spent rehashing the same points over and over? The arguments against women as priests come off as completely archaic in the face of thousands of (non-Catholic) churches with female leaders serving tens and hundreds of thousands of laity who have no problem seeing Christ's embodiment in a woman, just as they have no problem in seeing Christ's presence in any individual who isn't a 30-33 year old Jewish man in the first century. It reminds me of how archaic arguments against integration seemed when I learned about them in school, or arguments against women having the right to vote for the people who represent the interests of the community and society in local and national government. Once a change is made and the initial hysteria against it dies down, the dust settles to reveal just how ridiculous the recently-outdated systems were. Hopefully this argument will go the way of phrenology (the study of personality through the bumps in one's head).
Well, that's quite a bit for now. Sorry for no pictures, but the internet is being a bit feisty right now. I don't have nearly compelling enough pictures to justify that battle.
My Garrison Keillor quote is getting a bit stale, so I'll try something new (this is not intended to be morbid, it just caught my eye this week):
We all die. The goal is not to live forever, the goal is to create something that will. ~Chuck Palahniuk
Meghan
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