I have been feeling for a while like I need to get into doing more volunteer work. I used to, but then had a tiny child and it felt hard. But now I do have the time.
I was very inspired by Sicko, the new movie by Michael Moore about America's lack of health care for its citizens, and the contrast between that and various other countries. I am thinking about looking into how I can support the effort to improve that.
One of my favorite volunteer things I ever did was I taught one man to read. Troy worked in a lumber factory, where they turned trees into boards to build with. He worked with the sawdust, hauling, hauling, hauling. On Tuesdays and Thursdays after work, he would hurry home to shower and get the sawdust out of very pore, put on his very best clothes, and meet me at the local library for an hour and a half. When we first started we had a hard time simply understanding the other. I was from a college-educated New York culture and he was from African-American deep country Mississippi. We spent a fair amount of time saying, "Hunh?" to each other at first.
But we were smart and learned to understand each other. He worked hard. Progress was slowish at first, as he worked with paper and pencil and books for the first time in his life, and as I learned how to impart this skill I took as much for granted as I did breathing. After about 6 months, we could both see huge progress and he started really getting not just how to be taught, but how to teach himself. We were on the front page of the local newspaper once, and with various other achievements, that is one of the ones I am still proudest of.
When we started working together, he had a 3 year old he couldn't read to. By the end of our nearly two years together, he could read to Troy Jr. and even help him begin to learn to read himself....
