Service

Outside the classroom, I volunteer in three places: a teen center, a crisis center for survivors of domestic violence, and a county historical society. None of this was a plan. Each one started as a yes to something small, and now it’s just what I do.

The teen center is the loudest of the three. A few staff, a building full of teenagers, basketball, a patio, a vegetable garden, occasionally a nerf-gun shootout. The work is knowing names and noticing things.

At the crisis center I answer phones and do intake at the front desk so the counselors can be in session. It’s a center for survivors of domestic violence, so that is close to everything I can say about it. The counselors are very good at what they do, and I like working alongside them. I still have a forty-hour training to finish before I can do more there.

Then there’s the historical society, a museum and archive run entirely by volunteers, most of them decades older than me. The collection includes a rose from Abraham Lincoln’s funeral, a rocking chair the volunteers insist is haunted, and an opium pipe stolen from a den in 1935. It also includes about ten thousand photographs that exist on one computer in the building, and obituaries going back to the 1850s, which is the part I care about. I give tours and help people find their dead. A man came in this spring asking, almost offhand, about his family name; an hour later we had traced his people back a hundred and seventy years, to a sister who died as an infant. The two little kids he’d brought with him wanted to touch everything, so I let them: old cloth, flax, iron, magnifying glasses.

There were paid versions of this, before teaching. For three and a half years I coordinated programs at a research center in Tunis: affiliation letters so that visiting scholars could do their fieldwork, advice for graduate students on how to work in Tunisian archives, a library of thirty-five hundred books, and, once, the recovery of a photographic archive of early twentieth-century Tunisia after the platform that hosted it shut down.

I’d like to have something large to say about all this, and mostly I don’t; the closest I come is elsewhere. What I have is an observation I can’t yet explain. The paid work keeps ending (I moved home from Tunisia, and then a school year arrived), but the volunteering continues, and it gives me something I haven’t found anywhere else. I don’t know yet what that is. When I figure it out, it will probably change more than my volunteering.