Today marked my second year of serving as an AmeriCorps VISTA member on MLK day. While my second year is a MILLION times better than my first year it is not without difficulties. Over the past couple of months I have struggled being where I am at, doing the work I do and asking myself why. Why am I doing this again? It is hard to see my impact from behind a desk. It is hard to see my work making a difference. But today I got outside and they handed me a power tool and I remembered.
There was a key ceremony while we were there and the tears and excitement that came from these people was overwhelming. I was raised poor but I always had a home and to see these people getting a home for possibly the first time really struck a chord in me. And while it does not answer all my questions or really justify the insanity that goes along with a second year it just for a second clarified the vow I took with my friends and teammates to fight poverty in the US. I am not going to say it made everything okay in my world, but it will make sitting behind a desk okay for a while...at least get me through to my next girls night with mere and sa...one that will hopefully remind me what else I have gotten from this.
"The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty."
-Martin Luther King Jr.
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I meandered through your blog today... It wasn't until I began reading it that I realized how much of our friendship was lost. It leaves a hole in my heart.
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