Service, Part II

In a departure from the normal Labor Day activities of lounging around the house doing absolutely nothing or going shopping for things I don't need (but are on sale!), I joined up with the group affectionately known as the CRDub Service Club (aka my ward, coordinated by its service committee) to head to Vermont and help people whose homes had been flooded during Hurricane/Tropical Storm (but still disastrous) Irene.

There were about 25 of us. That was awesome. They really weren't sure what to do with all of us (in part because we did not all come with rubber boots, shovels, gloves, and a willingness to get covered in mud, as instructed). One entire street of about 25 homes was completely devastated, with craters where backyards used to be, mud in practically every basement (and everywhere else), and in some cases, no basement at all, because the foundation was completely washed away.

I helped where I could, and the bulk of the real work I did involved scraping wallpaper off a home that had been flooded and needed to be completely gutted before being put back together. I thought of that Primary song, "When we're helping, we're happy..." and felt glad I could do something useful to assist, even if it was humid and hot and the latex gloves (because I forgot my useful ones) made my hands sweat more than the entire rest of my body while I was working.  As a matter of fact, I didn't even mind all that, because I have a home and food storage and a car that runs and a place to sleep tonight and a job and the Gospel, and there is basically nothing wrong with my life. So I was just glad I could make a difference in the lives of the few people we helped, and hoped there were 400 other people as willing as I was who would come along after and keep helping, since I had to come home and go back to work tomorrow.

Seeing the devastation made me want to quit my job and become a humanitarian aid organizer, someone who could come in after a disaster and rally the troops and organize communications and collect donations and provide food and restore order and peace in the lives of people who had just lost everything.

Makes everything else I do seem sort of mundane.