Service

Outside the classroom, I volunteer in three places: a teen center, a crisis center for survivors of domestic violence, and a county historical society. None of this was a plan. Each one started as a yes to something small, and now it’s just what I do.

The teen center is the loudest of the three. A few staff, a building full of teenagers, basketball, a patio, a vegetable garden, occasionally a nerf-gun shootout that I am too willing to lead. The work is knowing names and noticing things. One kid, seventeen, homeschooled, told me he’d left school because of the bullying and had come because he wanted to make friends; he’d found the place through its thrift shop. I introduced him to the kids playing table tennis. Next time I owe him karaoke; he loves karaoke.

At the crisis center I answer phones and do intake at the front desk so the counselors can be in session. It’s a center for survivors of domestic violence, so that is close to everything I can say about it. The counselors are very good at what they do, and I like working alongside them. I still have a forty-hour training to finish before I can do more there.

Then there’s the historical society, a museum and archive run entirely by volunteers, most of them decades older than me. The collection includes a rose from Abraham Lincoln’s funeral, a rocking chair the volunteers insist is haunted, and an opium pipe stolen from a den in 1935. It also includes about ten thousand photographs that exist on one computer in the building, and obituaries going back to the 1850s, which is the part I care about. I give tours and help people find their dead. A man came in this spring asking, almost offhand, about his family name; an hour later we had traced his people back a hundred and seventy years, to a sister who died as an infant. The two little kids he’d brought with him wanted to touch everything, so I let them: old cloth, flax, iron, magnifying glasses.

There were paid versions of this, before teaching. For three and a half years I coordinated programs at a research center in Tunis: affiliation letters so that visiting scholars could do their fieldwork, advice for graduate students on how to work in Tunisian archives, a library of thirty-five hundred books, and, once, the recovery of a photographic archive of early twentieth-century Tunisia after the platform that hosted it shut down.

Then, this past year, I worked part-time for a township, the kind of small local government that keeps a food pantry and pays the rent for families about to lose their housing. My job was grants and paperwork. But twice in the spring, someone from the food pantry came to find me because an older man had come in speaking only Arabic. The first time, I translated, and he kept blessing me the whole time. The second time, his driver’s license had the wrong address on it, and the rules are the rules, and all I could do was take a printed list of other food pantries and mark on it, in Arabic, which one was a church and which one was a mosque. He left disappointed. It was the day before Eid.

I’d like to have something large to say about all this, and mostly I don’t; the closest I come is elsewhere. What I have is an observation I can’t yet explain. The paid work keeps ending (I moved home from Tunisia, and then a school year arrived), but the volunteering continues, and it gives me something I haven’t found anywhere else. At the teen center I can watch kids play basketball for an hour with nothing else in my mind at all, and for my mind, that is not a small thing. I don’t know yet what that is. When I figure it out, it will probably change more than my volunteering.