In addition to teaching, prayer, writing, music, reading, and my schnauzer, I volunteer serving people at a food pantry where I live. I've done this off and on for over twenty years now. I have been there for a little over a year and am happy that I have been doing so. I would like to be able to say that there was some kind of philanthropic, humanitarian, or slightly spiritual reason that I began to do so. There really isn't one. I started serving there because the community college where I was teaching and making a livable wage cut back on our allotted credit hours to teach while claiming that it was the new Obamacare that we were being required to buy that we couldn't already pay for. All of a sudden, I had too much time on my hands and was winding up with cabin fever in my apartment.
It has drastically changed since I began there through changes in leadership almost completely. Some of those changes have been really good and some of those changes are perpetual.
Just like my ongoing quest for balance in law and grace, I find that from time to time I meet someone stuck in the "Us and Them" false dichotomy. I am not the only person, by any means, seeking for and learning about this balance of grace and the law, and I don't think that I ever will be finished with it. "Us and Them" mentality is at the core of grace and the law. The problem that continues this false dichotomy is "the end." Where do I end and the next person begin?
This year we began serving with a new graduate brought to the area through an awesome organization called the Border Servant Corps. I am native of El Paso, Texas and was born on the Fort Bliss Military Reservation. Army brats are a little different from a lot of other El Pasoans, and the same, in the sense that we have usually lived in several other places. Our new intern and floor manager is a brand new university graduate or so he claimed. I don't know him much. He went to school just outside of Philadelphia and he's Hispanic. He has a minor in Latino Studies, or so he claimed.
The first thing that I noticed that he said to me was that he decided to serve in El Paso to experience Latin culture and not just study it. My inner thought was that I realized the need for experiential education; however, most of El Paso is Chicano. He didn't know the difference and moved across the country to immerse himself in a culture that isn't primarily there. Since then, I have just kept reminding myself that he is new.
Yesterday, he talked with me about wanting to get a ristra for the reason it was intended which is drying them for future use and a sign for open hospitality which I found to be interesting. As the day went on, he had the need to question whether or not I was there to volunteer. I'm always there to volunteer as that's why I go there, and when I brought it up, he immediately said that he didn't think that I was a client. There are people who volunteer and are clients there.
The more I am there, the more a "beggars can't be choosers" philosophy is instituted into our lives. I used to be there without someone having a control issue. There is always a control issue there now. What it really was yesterday was the fashionable way to get that person's way. We were leaving and people have always had the choice as to leave through the front or back door based on where that person was parked. Now, the hours have changed from closing at 4 to 3, which I don't agree with as people work and have to pick up kids from school, we were asked which way we were leaving the building and then newbie decided that people going through the front door were wrong when they chose it. Why?
A man had shown up outside of the building, and the pantry had just closed. Therefore, having a man standing outside of the pantry whom he had decided was a late client was now too dangerous to go through the front door over. My thought was "Newbie, it's time to go." Trying to instill fear as a leader in the volunteers is not the way to fight hunger in America. Instilling fear when you would like to create hospitality is disgusting. When one of the volunteers tried to leave through the front door due to disability and how close she parked, he claimed that he was concerned all of a sudden about her "well-being." He then thanked me for leaving through the back door. He cared that he got his way with me which is why I was thanked and completed the othered the man outside while trying to instill fear in the volunteer inside of the pantry. He doesn't want to open to door, so I was treated well because he got his way and she was belittled for choosing what was actually better for her.
I usually leave through the other one because it causes me to walk a little further to the bus stop. I also walk three or four bus stops away just for the walk and the time it gives me to reflect upon the experience is invaluable. I really can't stand this person. He's still in a stage of internal childhood that really only understands the world in very strict lines of black and white unless it suits him.
I find it to be completely pathetic for people to claim that when they don't get what they want or something isn't convenient that another person's well-being is in danger. Instilling fear through othering whom you understand to be clientele is bad for all of us.
Wag more, bark less new graduate. You're leaving in a year. Namaste.
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