Joplin--Work

Woodland has taught me how to roof a house and love doing it.  I'm grateful to be part of a church who taught me from a very early age to be a hard physical worker.  Sometimes I think I learned this lesson too well.

In Joplin this year, the majority of our team worked at a homeless shelter, continuing work on a second story addition.  They were undeniably the cool group.  They went to work at 6:00 a.m., sent people home vomiting from the heat, and by the end of the week, the piles of wood actually looked like a building.

I was not on that crew.

With seven(ish) other people, I worked for Americorps, surveying homes throughout Joplin to see which families still had needs.  My fellow crew members were self-professed non-construction workers, either always or as a result of age catching up with them.  I am by no stretch of the imagination a magnificent construction worker, but I felt a little like I'd been put out to pasture.

This imagined unimportance was the result of my priority-addled mind.  And that's too bad, because it took me far too long to realize what a cool job I had.

Four years ago, I survived a tornado that hit my school and wiped out 80% of our dorms, killing no one, thank God.  It was the most traumatizing event of my life so far, and the only time I have legitimately thought I was going to die.  It's been several years, but still I panic at the sound of tornado sirens, and my fear of tornadoes has morphed into a fear of thunderstorms at night.  What I mean is, I'm still affected by it.  Living in a town where no one else experienced it, sometimes I feel like I ought to be "over it."  People rarely ask me how I'm doing, and I assume that they are right for not bringing it up.  But it's something I do want to talk about.

Surveying in Joplin was cathartic for me, not because I told anyone about my experience, but because I got to do for others what I've been wanting people to do for me.  I could ask people if they needed help, and I could listen while they repeated the stories they have probably shared over fifty times, and need to share fifty more.  I was able to say, "It's been over a year, but this is still a huge deal.  Do you want to talk?"

We only worked four hours a day.  We wore tank tops and flip flops.  We didn't carry hammers or put up walls.  But the surveying work we did was valuable.  I believe it was helpful to the people we met, and it was definitely helpful for me.