may nothing you dismay

[theladyrose]

“Parting is such sweet sorrow” rather accurately sums up my last day at the family shelter where I've been spending time. I never really saw myself as the kind of person who enjoyed being with kids as more of my volunteering experience has been with senior citizens and hospital patients with chronic disorders, or tutoring older kids one-on-one. My priorities there were to ameliorate academic difficulties, act as a mentor to kids dealing with the usual teenage transitional issues and be a source of comfort and distraction to those experiencing various kinds of pain. Those experiences were certainly valuable, but I developed fewer deep relationships at those places as I had less of a chance to get to know the others there. The relatively privileged teenagers I spent time with were either going to grow out of their current problems or go through years of self-destructive experimentation finding themselves, or the more sickly people would approach the end with dignity or despair; I had a more finite range of expectations for their outcomes.

Needless to say, my experience at the shelter was different in that I had expected. I am ashamed by my initial, low expectations and am honored by how much they let me into their tightly knit community. To actually have a group of people really look forward to seeing me, even if it was just once a week — I feel privileged that they welcomed and accepted my relatively brief presence in their lives. It's so rare to feel like I actually matter to anyone my age, that my value is more than being useful by fulfilling a set number of expectations or responsibilities. What’s amazed me the most is the resilience of all of the people I’ve met at the shelter, the sense of family and community they’ve developed in the face of uncertainty. One or two of the younger children were more “troubled,” probably compounded by general developmental issues of testing the boundaries of authority and being new admits to the shelter, but overall the kids were motivated to do well in school and foster positive relationships with each other.

I’ve learned more about my own limits and prejudices, realizing that if I expect abused children to act like they’re emotionally “broken” true healing and growth can’t take place. My own academic concerns have been focused on adolescent/adult onset of psychological dysfunction and how self-destructive patterns manifest themselves, often in the long-term. Only over the course of these two months, however, have I come to really understand why early intervention is so critical. These children really have learned to look out for each other, and I find myself continually amazed by their spirit of adaptation. I can only hope that I can become as capable of moving beyond suffering as they have. laleia, do you know if it's possible to volunteer with JEP even without taking a class?

Best words I've heard all week, while playing tag:

Mark (aged 10): You're hiding inside a playhouse made for 6 year olds. Aren't you too old to do that?


Needless to say, there's great value in being humbled by someone half your age and acknowledging your own immaturity :P


Now, for something completely different:

There's a pretty interesting discussion about sex in 60's and 70's TV at cult_tv_lounge. In other cult TV news, Hulu has quite a few episodes of various hard-to-find American TV shows alongside currently popular ones; as far as I can tell, the site's totally legal. lilbabiangel888, who I have to thank for the recommendation, told me that one of the sponsors is NBC, which is why the quality of the clips is so good because they're pulling everything from their archives. Unfortunately the version of The Invisible Man up isn't the one with David McCallum, but I really can't complain about the overall variety! I just started watching I Spy, which has been surprisingly enjoyable; I finally get a glimpse of the Hong Kong where my mother grew up because of all those on-location shoots.