Habitat

Yesterday, husband and I spent our first day as volunteers at a Habitat for Humanity building site. Since we are home improvement junkies, we thought Habitat would be a good door to knock on. Out in Northeast Portland, Habitat is building a neighborhood of seven charming little duplexes. Building started a year ago, so the units are now at the "finish work" stage. I enjoyed the work, and I definitely want to go back again. But I made some observations, and experienced some frustration that left me wondering if I’m too much of a control freak to ever really thrive in volunteer work. Or maybe some of you out there have had similar experiences.

This has been a huge project; according to our group organizer, it’s the largest project ever attempted by Habitat in Portland. And, it kind of looked like they had bitten off more than they could chew. The very fact that construction had begun over a year ago, and the units were still not even close to being finished was a clue to this. So was the fact that they had brought in a crew of Americorps volunteers to work on the project. I wondered if maybe they weren’t getting a large enough volunteer pool from the community to finish the work in a timely manner, so they had to call in the reserves.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I think Americorps is a very worthy organization, and the idea of young people performing a term of service should perhaps even be written into law. But I’m not sure they were the solution for this project…young college kids, most of whom have not yet owned a home of their own, so they didn’t come armed with even basic home maintenance skills. Now, I don’t know what kind of training was provided for them. Enough to give the organizers the confidence to appoint them "group leaders"—the ones who got to drag little queues of local volunteers around, looking for stuff to do.

I was happy enough to spend half the day crawling around on the floor caulking baseboards (the glucosamine must be working, because I’m not nearly as miserable this morning as I thought I would be…) But as I worked, I observed a greater degree of confusion, error, misdirection, and duplication of effort than I was comfortable with on a project of this size. For example, one crew was assigned to installing doorknobs and other hardware. Two hours later, we were assigned to go paint the doors. Shouldn’t we have done that before the hardware went on? I know this makes me appear totally anal-retentive (if the shoe fits…?) But multiply these little organizational gaffes by ten or twenty, and you have something approaching anarchy. People assigned to projects that had already been done. People doing things they had no idea how to do, and no one checking their work when they were finished. Groups assigned to redo work that had been done days ago, but it was just now being discovered to be unacceptable.

I found myself piping up with (unsolicited) directions and advice, simply because that is what I do. Nobody got mad at me, thank God, but I did get a few strange looks. And it just made me wonder…why are there not more people with great organizational skills out there among the volunteer ranks? Because it’s a skill that isn’t natural to the service personality? Most service-oriented people I’ve known are long on "people-skills," but short on…common sense. And they seem so reluctant to piss off the volunteers, that they’re afraid to tell them, "Okay, this is what needs to be done, this is what I want you to do, and this is how I want you to do it." Am I nuts, or don’t most volunteers approach a project with open minds and ready hands? I think service organizations sell volunteers short, if they think they will lose them if they really expect them to work.

Lord, don’t I look like the classic "glass is half empty" person? I’m reminded of the first scene in "A Charlie Brown Christmas," where Linus is chiding Charlie Brown for being the only person he knows that can take a season that’s supposed make people happy and turn it into a problem. I AM Charlie Brown…

But, of course the experience was still a good one. Though I would like to be able to offer my organizational skills to the project, I will be happy to give my hands, my back, my feet…the parts of me they are asking me to give. On the drive home, a huge bird swooped into sight ahead of us. I couldn’t make out its coloring right away, but by its size and its "flying board" silhouette, I knew it was a bald eagle. He flew low, straight down the highway, and we drove right under him. To me, this was the sign of a special blessing. Someone in the Spirit World was telling us we had done good. What more can I ask?