classroom volunteers

I remember elementary school vividly. The colorful papers and art projects littering the walls and ceilings, carpet squares on the floor, rolling backpacks, and desks that got bigger as you got older – some say they peaked in high school, but honestly, I think I peaked then, in rooms where you knew everyone’s name and teachers would bring their dogs to school. Running at lunch and play practice during school rather than after. While our time was filled with dance and sports and all of the other one million activities parents had their 9-year-olds involved in, teachers were (and are) stretched thin, with their after-school lives consisting of grading math quizzes and creating lesson plans that will make science appealing to snotty children. They needed help. And that is where the volunteers came in. I remember in first grade, there was a different mom that came in to help daily. They did the most mundane tasks, but without them, those things were just another item on a busy teacher’s to-do list. Pulling staples out of the wall, sorting endless stacks of papers, sometimes even grading, without these mom-helpers, the bigger picture would take longer to accomplish.

It is this, the bigger picture, that helps me continue when work at the Farm has gotten to the point of being painstakingly boring. When it’s been an hour and you’re still pulling weeds out of the same plot of dirt and the boy who you’ve just met but whose name you’ve already forgotten hasn’t spoken at all. When you check the time but only 3 minutes have passed and it feels like 30. When your hands are so cold, but desperately want to pick each and every clover because you’re a perfectionist like that. It is times like these, when it is important to remember that you’re doing something important.

Compared to other service learning opportunities that people in the class participate in, getting to work directly with families and the hungry, my work is much more basic, with the connection to the environment harder to spot. Our environment is on a downward spiral and though the data is hard to argue against, the people with the most power to cause drastic change find ways to do it. This is why it is significant in the environmental fight for sustainability, that it be practiced everywhere, even at a small farm at a large university in a city that I, as well as many others, have fallen in love with. The fact that everything at this little farm is thought of, from using compostable paper bags to put garlic cloves in, to creating a whole separate compostable toilet system on site, to doing everything by hand, is making a difference.

I like to think of it as a domino effect. If the farm (perhaps by becoming even more sustainable) is like this, then it inspires the dining halls, which inspires the students, which hopefully will inspire the university at large, which could perhaps inspire the city of Seattle (a city which already places a heavy emphasis on ‘going green’ with its public transportation and eliminations of plastic utensils), which could maybe inspire other major cities. Granted this is far-fetched but it is not entirely impossible.

My personal contribution to the farm is important. Perhaps even for just helping a small business run, but I like to think that I am making a difference. That all this weed-pulling is helping something somewhere. That, like the mom-helpers in elementary school classrooms, my routine, monotonous, work is helping. And that is all that matters.

-- note: this photo is not of the farm, just one of my absolutely beautiful campus --