On Travelling, Cozy Hats, and Being a Young Adult Volunteer

I've just returned from a week-long vacation with Rob to Dublin and London. It was good craic all around, and lots of good stories have come out of it. And lots of good thinking was done, as well. Here are some thoughts transcribed from my paper journal - they will also be posted, without reading music, to the PC(USA) website as my first official "Letter from a Young Adult Volunteer."

Since this is transcribed from my paper journal, you won't find the plethora of useful links you usually get through these - I hope you don't mind.

Speaking of reading music, the choice for today is John Mayer's "Something's Missing." Click play, then read on.

Depending on where you are, hostels can be a fantastic or a horrifying experience. Of course, this also depends quite a bit on your state of mind when you walk through the door. Also, like any other experience, it also depends disproportionately on your expectations.

On the subject of location, Camden Place Hostel in Dublin and Astor Museum Inn in London are tops. I won't really go into further detail here, that's something for you to find out for yourself.

Concerning state of mind, it really helps to arrive at a hostel if you've been walking for miles in the rain through crowded shopping districts, or if you've been playing human Tetris for hours on a very small, very overcrowded train through North Wales, only shortly after an equally harrowing experience with booking ferry passage across the Irish Sea.

I think that's self-explanatory, as well. If you really want to enjoy a hot shower and warm bed, take advantage of the horrible weather of the British Isles first.

(Incidentally, after living in Belfast for several months, London feels downright tropical. In my flatmate Rob’s words, London is completely south of any Scandinavian country. Belfast, on the other hand, might as well be in the Arctic Circle.)

The subject of expectations is where my story gets a little tricky. My only real experiences with hostel life consist of one night in Perú, and one night in a Hungarian villa, next to a very sketchy hostel.

Oh, and the truly terrifying movie 'Hostel.'

Naturally, I had mixed feelings about our accommodations for our holiday, but, being the socially-responsible, low-budget volunteers we are, hostel-ing seemed to be the most prudent option. So, on the morning of December 29th, we set out for Dublin, and Camden Place hostel, which definitely have us what we were looking for - a warm bed, a hot shower, friendly staff, free breakfast, free Wi-Fi, and I'll stop before I start sounding like a bad advertisement. The Astor Museum Inn also gave us what we needed - a place filled with awesome people that served as a great home base for exploring the vast expanse of London.

Now, I realize that this is NOT at all what the average hostel-vacation experience is like. I have plenty of friends who can tell horror stories about flooding toilets, kleptomaniacal roommates, and far-too-wild hostel parties. I can only imagine how bad it could be, so I know to not have such high expectations for other low-budget accommodation experiences in the future.

Something's Missing

But, if even hostels can be so awesome (sometimes), what else am I missing by continuing to live a comfy, Eastern-Virginian life? For example, at the beginning of summer 2009, I never would have expected to spend a week in the powerfully beautiful mountains of Montreat, North Carolina with a group of six truly fantastic youth from First Presbyterian Church of Richmond, Virginia. Even more surprising was driving through South Dakota's Badlands with family and friends less than a week after returning from Montreat. Less than a day after that, I was in a small town in North Dakota, a short drive away from the world's largest fake buffalo.

Buffalo: check.

The wonder of the World Wide Web gave birth to a ridiculous number of 'best-of' lists at the end of 2009, which, being the sentimental technophile I am, I read voraciously. Lists of the top twenty-nine movies, the top fifteen albums, the ten best gadget ideas of the decade, the five funniest twitter users to follow, the best of everything - whatever I could think of, I found a list for it. Remarkably, though, in 2005, I never thought that half of these things would exist, much less that I'd appreciate them as much as I do. Twitter? The Netbook? Peruvian hats with ear flaps?

Peculiar hat: check.

I also never pictured that I'd choose to very abruptly pack a few bags and relocate to Belfast for a year. To be honest, at that time, I was completely certain that I'd be in Africa by this time. Or Japan. Or maybe South America. Instead, here I am, writing from a flat in Dunmurry, Northern Ireland, decidedly not on a medical-school track, working in several churches and organizations where it seems that my biggest contributions to date have been vegetable soup, giant chewy sugar cookies, and donning a lab coat and fairy wings while miming deep conversation with Joseph the carpenter from Nazareth.

You read that right.

Fairy wings: check.

A Year of Service, A Lifetime of Change

My favorite household chores have always been the sort where I can see the progress I've made - mowing the lawn is a great example. I know when I'm done, I can see what I've changed, and while it might take some extra pushing to get me started, it's a generally pleasant experience.

Not so with the task of 'mission in partnership.' It is not the glamorous work that gets presented by national news outlets (well, not often, sometimes, they catch wind of what we're doing and decide to share it). It is not a sexy, Nobel-laureate sort of field. It is not the saving-the-world stuff that makes people in coffee shops and bars flock to hear stories. In fact, it's very hard to explain, and probably even harder to understand. I recall a funny story about that from a night in Dublin - ask me about it sometime.

What's this "year of service, lifetime of change" business about, then? It is the YAV t-shirt slogan, after all. An obvious "lifetime of change" would be the immense experiential value of the year to us volunteers. We practice socially-and-environmentally-responsible living. We live in intentional community with the churches we work with, as well as the other other YAVs. We have great cross-cultural experiences. We participate in worshipping communities. This list could go on and on. I certainly don't want to diminish the value of any of these things - I find all of these things and more in the work I've been doing, but I think there's something much, much deeper there.

The YAV home office likes to use an incredibly simple, very weighty phrase to describe what being a volunteer really means: "Being, not Doing." I remember hearing this a lot working in university Residence Life, as well. The job was really all about being available for those around you, co-existing with them, and trying to encourage them to do the same. The real impact didn't come from fancy bulletin boards, awesome hall meetings, or (thankfully) how many times I strapped on a pair of wings and pretended to be the angel Gabriel. It's not about how much I gets out of it, or even how much anyone else gets out of my work, but about meeting someone's needs, whatever they are, in whatever way I can provide.

Not about meeting their expectations - if I tried to live up to everyone's expectations of me, I'd be a very exhausted volunteer with no time for myself, not to mention being very disappointed with my lack of success.

Not about meeting my own expectations, either - if I tried to that, I would never have seen the Badlands, I'd never have started wearing my peculiar (and very warm) Peruvian hat, and I'd probably be frighteningly unfulfilled in medical school.

One Small Child That Saved The World

(And Ten Million More That Probably Could)

The intellectual-progressive-hipster Presbyterian in me shudders to say this aloud, much less share it with the world through the Internet, but the only thing I can do in a situation like this is rely on God. Thankfully, God has a very fortunate pattern of helping out, and, well, being God.

I realize this is a vague statement. It's meant to be, simply because this Parent-Son-Spirit God is wonderfully artistic and expressive, and downright mysterious. It's terribly hard to find God sometimes, and I'm not always the best at that sort of spiritual searching. It's especially difficult when most days of the week feature things like being tackled by nine-year-olds or serving sixty-four children cocktail sausages.

A lifetime of change? It's hard to imagine that those sausages will cause too much serious change other than potentially increasing someone's blood pressure someday, and that the kids using me as a jungle gym has definitely made me a bit stronger physically. However I may feel about the work at the time, though, God's not missing from the equation, she’s just sitting quietly in the corner of the church hall, waiting very patiently to be talked to.

Lifetime of change: check.

Do You Hear What I Hear?

I love technology as much as the next blogger. I see the good in facebook, google wave, and the iPhone, and I've recently (along with our dear Moderator) become well-versed in the 140-character microblogging language of Twitter. The "Gadget Age" presents us with a near-global level of connectedness that not even the 1990's saw coming. We can even share music videos whenever we want!

Speaking of that, your latest bit of reading music is a live performance "Fast Paced World," the title track from the new album by Canadian soul-gospel-folk-samba-country string band-zydeco-Irish dance band The Duhks.

(Another excellent, positive use of technology would be to buy the studio album on iTunes. The Duhks also support sustainable living projects - go team!)

Technology, particularly the Internet, gives us lots of good things - widespread access to media, humor, research, up-to-the-second news, instant video communication with loved ones - whatever you want, you can probably find it. It's even become and essential element in disseminating culture (this short NPR piece describes that phenomenon perfectly).

It also, as with anything, has its vices - I don't need to list them, at least one of them is probably fresh on your mind from some recent newsbyte, but I've talked about this example before.

From Belfast to Carabayllo, from Kenya to Kerala, we're touched by the near-constant flow of zeroes and ones.

Television, Television

As I found myself embroiled in the madness (delightful madness, but madness nonetheless) of the holidays, planning a vacation to Dublin and London, producing a Christmas play, and celebrating with new friends and old, two strange things happened: 1) I lost my Christmas spirit, and 2) "The Truman Show" came on TV - a truly bizarre use of modern technology.

My first thought was that Sir Richard Branson had decided that it counted as a Christmas movie (it was the evening of December 23rd, after all). Already in a bit of a "Bah Humbug" kind of mood, I settled into my armchair to watch. If you don't remember the movie, it's Jim Carrey's 1998 existential classic, about a man (Truman) born and raised within an enormous television studio, starring in an eponymous television program that has been a worldwide hit for the first thirty-odd years of his life. It raises deep questions about the nature of God, religion, and the exploration of life - even "Die Hard" and "Die Hard 2: Die Harder" are easier to peg as Christmas movies.

Information Overload

It got me thinking, though - although far from the Stepford life of Truman, I definitely exist in a world controlled by some outside power, whether it's a voice in clouds or, well, Sir Richard Branson. Instead of a carefully scripted interaction with a news vendor every morning on my way to work, the combined powers of CNN and NPR deliver a constant feed of 140-character summaries to my computer screen, complete with short-form links, in case I want to learn more than "Suspect Charged In Airplane Terrorist Attack http://su.pr/1cu9te." Instead of a perfectly-put-together housewife suggesting that I buy a brand new grinder-slicer-dicer-peeler-pizza cutter-oven-self-defense device, I have the almighty and eternally suggestive iTunes store at my fingertips.

If I've got that much information overload over twelve minutes in the four-parking-space-sized flat I'm living in now, I can only imagine the messages that the community around me are receiving. Northern Ireland, is, for all its troubled past, very squarely in the global "North." Wireless high-speed internet is more than common, and continues to spread like kudzu - up-to-the-second news and communication are ubuquitous. There are more subtle messages present, as well. The schools of Northern Ireland are still overwhelmingly segregated along Catholic-Protestant lines, with only about 5% of students attending a 'mixed' school. While many public figures have taken very visible steps towards reconciliation, prominent legislators seem to gloss over the delicate issues. The sprawling community across the street from my flat is Seymour Hill, a largely Unionist, formerly-government-controlled housing estate, encompassing several Protestant churches, along with several bastions of Loyalist paramilitary influence.

Did you get my message?

In the U.S., we're often concerned with the messages that our children receive through music, television and video games. Sex, drugs, rock and roll, gratuitous violence, more sex, more drugs, Kanye West, actual gangsta rap, Dane Cook, Grand Theft Auto, Goth Metal, Katy Perry, playing Stairway to Heaven LPs backwards, and the list goes on and on.

Here in Northern Ireland, however, the same negative, destructive messages are present, with some unfortunate additions - imposing, balaclava-clad figures clutching assault rifles are painted on the street-facing sides of housing estates. Paramilitary-aligned remembrance gardens are often the only green patches in Belfast's residential areas. Miles and miles of physical barriers separate Unionist and Nationalist neighborhoods - walls that, unlike their slightly more infamous cousin, show no signs of coming down anytime soon.

I suppose that's where our work begins - deconstructing and understanding the messages that the community is receiving, and then rebuilding them around the central message of Love and Peace (or Else). As I return to work after the holiday season, I'll be doing some more seeking - how I can partner with the churches and organizations I'm placed in to rejuvenate their ministries, and how to transform the messages presented to the community from ones of violence and segregation to words of reconciliation and unity.

Maybe Sir Richard Branson had something right in putting on "The Truman Show" this December 23rd. Not a single Christmas tune was hummed or whistled, there were no hints of nativities, midnight masses, or executive Christmas parties, but there was something tucked inside Jim Carrey's existential crisis - the need to escape from a world where we're told way too much and simply believe it.

And in case I don't see you...good afternoon, good evening, and good night.

A sad day for central Virginia

Lovers of rainbow cookies, now is your time to mourn.

Ukrop's Stores have finally been sold to Giant-Carlisle, a Netherlands-based firm.

About 70% of my childhood has been upset by this - so I apologise if I decry the horrors of such corporate takeovers in public places.