Doing Good v. Doing Well
A couple of weeks ago, after a hard day's volunteer work, somebody at Pisco sin Fronteras asked me, with a few minutes' notice, to give a computer lesson. It was apparently a regular thing, but the usual teacher was out of town and no substitute had been arranged. The request came from one of the three people in the place who I truely thought was hot, which cancelled out my usual just because I write software doesn't mean I'll know anything about yours reluctance. The assurance that it was fine to give the lesson in English was the only further convincing I needed. But still, when I teach, I like to have some kind of lesson plan... or at least an idea of what I'm going to teach!
So I found myself in the net café across the road, at a computer with a fisherman who spoke about as much English as I do Spanish, which still isn't very much. The operating system was Windows, of course, which I've had little experience with in the last five years, and none at all with Vista. It's been about that long since I've used Microslop Word, too, and it doesn't look a thing like the version I used in my university years. And did I mention the locale was set to es_PE? It was like navigating an 80s Mac: purely by icons. Oh yeah, and he used Hotmail for e-mail... I didn't realise that site still existed!
Still, with a little lot of help each way from Google Translate, I showed him how to send images from his USB stick, and save a flyer for his weekend touring business to the same. His reaction was like a stone ager if I'd shown him how to make fire. I felt like I'd bumbled around and looked like a dickhead, and he was ecstatic.
I've had this experience over and over again at PsF. I'd done a job, not as well as I thought I ought, but just the fact that I'd done it counted. The best I could do was good enough. I can't express what a different life experience this has been for me, right from the time that I came second in grade 3, beating over a hundred other pupils, and my dad said that's very nice, but in grade 4 I should be first. I wasn't, and since then, I've rarely felt any satisfaction from my work, especially work for others.
The grandé version of this phenomenon was El Baño de Denise, the bathroom and outdoor kitchen I built for a couple and their four kids in the last couple of weeks. (When I started, there were only three kids, but the mother looked eleven months pregnant.) Before the earthquake, they lived in a house the size of a California fourplex by the beach, and shared it with extended family. It all fell down, and since then they've been in a 4×5m single-room aluminium frame cottage with a nice view of the ocean behind the rubble of what was once their home. If one of the kids needed to poo in the middle of the night, they've had to knock on grandma's door three blocks away. Evidently, not everyone in the neighbourhood had this patience; one of the first things I had to do when I arrived at the site every day was cover turds and puddles with the desert sand the town was built upon.
I 'built' it the same way John Bradfield built the Sydney Harbour Bridge: I had a crew of three other volunteers (and a few extra on the days I needed them, like when we were pouring concrete), and a bunch of experts to consult on things like plumbing and how to attach bamboo to more bamboo. (All the dicking around I've done with X-10 has made me an expert on household electrics, as far as PsF was concerned-I even gave a class on the subject last week.) I did do a lot of the hands-on work myself, and learnt a tremendous amount about construction in the process, particularly about plumbing with PVC. But the days that went best were the days I did the most delegating... I found days of telling other people what to do surprisingly tiring, probably since I got up at 5:30 in the morning to do planning and work out what tools and materials we'd need.
Most days I had to send somebody back to HQ at some point to get something I'd forgotten, or ring PsF's wiry haired English Pagan truck driver and ask him to pick up something larger from downtown. And in the end, the concrete was uneven, the modular walls and windows we'd prefabricated from palette wood even more so, and it would've been nice if the ceiling was just a decimetre wider. (I probably left it the safest building electrically in Pisco, however, at least out of the ones scabbing power from the neighbours, which is the vast majority of them.) The father, a factory worker, did a lot of work too on his days off (nobody can dig a ditch like a Peruvian!) and I felt really shitty that it was so hard to communicate with him.
Still, the mother showered me with praise on Saturday, when I had to leave for a project leaders' meeting and leave the finishing touches (and clean-up) to my dedicated crew. I'm hardly surprised; I played a major role in giving a misfortunate family the gift of a toilet. (We'd all thrown in money to provide a few frills, like a bathroom mirror and a dunny brush, too.)
I've always suspected that a more meaningful-feeling job would make it easier to get up in the morning. That's not to say that the work I've done over the years hasn't had meaning; it just hasn't been as clear to me, and frankly, it hasn't been as important as this. I certainly had my mornings at PsF when I didn't want to get out of bed, and I imagine I would've had more if I'd had the kind of social/dating life I have in the cities I usually live in (or if I'd had any dating life at all). And it's proven to me the importance of taking time out to reassess and reorganise, instead of stubbornly focusing on a task and giving myself a hard time later for not seeing the bigger picture. But such a direct view of my labour making the world a better place is a motivator I've been seeking for years.