Before I became a nurse, I worked at non-profits which relied heavily on volunteers. At some point during my tenure at each of these, staff would discuss how much volunteers “cost”, i.e., the unexpected work and complications they unintentionally introduced. This is one such story of a disaster caused by well-meaning volunteers.
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Almost twenty years ago several colleagues and I took a group of first year college students on a community service trip to a rural, coastal area in South Carolina. One of the work days included assisting a local affordable housing non-profit. Prior to arriving, the volunteer coordinator had told us we would be working inside, but the universe has a wicked sense of humor. Upon pulling our fifteen passenger vans onto a dirt road to an address we’d been given, we learned instead that we would be cleaning up an illegal dump on a ten acre patch of land which had been donated to the group. Mosquitos and gnats buzzed around our heads and arms and the underbrush was thick with poison ivy and snakes. We needed biohazard gear, but every one of the students was wearing shorts.
The volunteer coordinator divided up the students and I stayed with the group charged with loading abandoned appliances and bags full of trash and roaches into a dumpster. Shortly after we began, my head jerked up when I heard a chainsaw revving. I watched in alarm as one of the eighteen year olds cut through a small, lanky tree and dropped it onto a low hanging power line. Before I could shout, “Don’t!” the student threw down his chainsaw and grabbed the tree sending an electric charge coursing through his body. Running to make sure he wasn’t permanently damaged, I next saw fire flare where the Spanish moss on the branches of the tree touched the still active line. The power line then fell to the ground draping its serpentine length across a chain link fence separating where we worked from a housing development...whose power we had just knocked out. Sirens began to sound as the fire department, electric company, and a police car roared to our site.
We had been there all of fifteen minutes.
As I walked toward the group of angry men sorting out what had happened and what needed to be done, the eyes of the volunteer coordinator met mine and at that moment it occurred to me, as it also seemed to occur to him, that none of us had signed liability waivers. The man was having a tough day. Our students were as shocked as the gathered officials and one muttered loudly enough that the rest of the group could hear, “Service scholars. We light up the world.”
Church ladies later brought lunch for our group. However, I am pretty sure it was leftovers from a food distribution or from a local food bank. The cake had mold on one side and the bread was stale. Given the events of the morning, it was probably a fair trade.
I have always been awed by the resilience of the young and this day was a perfect example. Our students got right back to work and focused all their energy on cleaning up the appliances, tires, and trash. If you have ever wondered how many college students it takes to deadlift an old refrigerator full of rotten food over the wall of a dumpster, it takes six. We cut branches, mowed, and raked. By the afternoon, an unusable patch of ground had been reclaimed making a site possible for a new home. Rapidly recovering their humor, one of the students wrote a haiku to honor the work:
Service scholars do
What no one else wants to do
Get in the dumpster
We left that day filthy and exhausted. After showers and a proper meal, we debriefed and had the Life Lessons Talk with the students about good communication, clear instructions, not grabbing hold of anything connected to a power line, hard work, and making the world better. The most important word, though, was from a program leader whose life philosophy was “do more good than bad.” She believed that we all screw up and cause damage just by living our lives, but we should try to make the balance lean toward the good. The students that day, I felt, had leaned toward the good.
I regularly remember that day in all of its awfulness and beauty because I need to remind myself to do more good than bad. I am older and have a lot more experience than I did twenty years ago, but I still lose my temper, say the completely wrong thing, talk when I should listen, judge, forget compassion, and act on stupid assumptions. My list, unfortunately, is long.
There is a release in giving up perfectionism and becoming comfortable with the knowledge that despite reasonable efforts and best intentions, things can get all screwed up. Upon recognizing these situations, I now picture myself opening my hands and falling into the chaos. It makes my body relax and I am more able to look around and see if there is anything I can do to make the situation better. Humility, honesty, an apology, and being willing to laugh at myself are all part of leaning toward the good.
I ran into one of the former service scholar students recently, the one who wrote the haiku. I was delighted to see him happy and doing great things with his life. It was a quick meeting and we focused more on his present than his past, but I can’t help but think that one cursed trip made a difference for him as it has for me. Sometimes working in a dumpster with mosquitoes nipping at your face, sirens wailing in the background, the smell of singed Spanish moss in the air, and the shared trauma of a service trip gone terribly wrong can be a great teacher and set you on a path of kindness and success.
