Home at Last

It's been a long 10 months. Graduation on April 27^th was bittersweet, but mostly sweet. I can't say I'm sad. That's not because I couldn't wait to escape, to be done with it all, to be free. Though that's all true – you try sleeping, eating and working together in close proximity with 8 to 10 to 150 other people 24/7 for ten months and see how you feel the first night you sleep in a room alone. Seriously though, try it. It's been the best, most difficult, most rewarding and defining experience of my life.

For many of us our AmeriCorps experience was a continuing process of coming of age. This program is at its most basic level a bunch of young people trying to figure themselves out while helping strangers. Every successful person has to figure out who they are at some point, and I can't think of a much better way to do that than through service. Fortunately for me, I'm far from the only one who feels that way.

I will never forget the people I met during my time with AmeriCorps and how we encouraged, challenged, and occasionally swore at each other. Though some of us may see each other in the future we'll never be together with all the same people in the same context ever again, as one of the keynote speakers at graduation pointed out. What was AmeriCorps NCCC Class 23 no longer exists, but it doesn't make me sad. There is a time and a season for everything. As this phase reaches its determined end, another begins, enlightened and shaped by the experiences of all those prior to it. Though our relationships won't and can't ever be the same, I will always remember with gratitude the people and places of this year by the lessons they taught me and the ways that they changed me.

I read a reflection at our pre-graduation awards ceremony which I think sufficiently sums up how I feel about this experience, so I'll include that at the end of this post. But first, a couple other thoughts from the year.

There's an important topic that we weren't allowed to talk about while still in the program and which many of my friends are speaking out on now that we've graduated, to which I'd like to add my voice. That topic is the issue of AmeriCorps' continued funding under the budget proposed by the new administration which is currently under review.

This budget calls for the elimination of the Corporation for National and Community Service, the organization that oversees AmeriCorps NCCC and thousands of other AmeriCorps positions around the country. Though everyone pays a different amount on tax day, on average CNCS costs taxpayers $3.37 a year toward its total budget of $1.1 billion. That works out to just over .03% of the 2016 US budget of about $3.267 trillion. The military budget, conversely, is slated to receive a significant increase.

We spend astronomical amounts of money on our military, and we should be supporting them with the best training and tools we have available, now more than ever. But the military exists to protect our country's peacetime freedom to make the best lives possible for ourselves and our neighbors. AmeriCorps is a program that changes the lives of its participants nationwide and inspires nearly everyone who comes across it to improve themselves and their community while accomplishing tangible, quantifiable good for the recipients of its aid. I think it would do our military a great disservice to cut what relatively little support the government gives to improving the country they are trying to protect through developing civic service, compassion, and responsibility in every day civilians.

I don't even know if there's anything I can do to help save the program, other than add my voice to those of us who've seen it firsthand and understand how invaluable it is. The more people are talking about the same thing, the more likely we are to be heard by the powers that be. There are people who are working to make the idea of service so ingrained in our culture that a politician wouldn't dare run for office if they hadn't completed their service year in their youth. Elimination of AmeriCorps would be a major blow to that goal.

History has proven that nothing but popular mass and momentum can advance worthy causes through political red tape, greed, ideological stagnation, whatever the obstacle may be. It's not going to be done by one impassioned speech delivered by a brave civic champion to a rapt and attentive Congress - the proverbial somebody else, somewhere far away. If that oration ever happens and I sincerely hope it does, it will mean nothing without the support of a very large number of people behind it, people like us.

I would encourage anyone reading this to talk about your experience, or your friend's experience, or your son or daughter or niece or nephew's experience with AmeriCorps as much as you can, even if you don't think it's a perfect program. I sure don't, and it never will be. But it's a monumental step in the right direction. I have no doubt that if allowed, AmeriCorps will continue to pay dividends through its role in the formation and inspiration of every hopeful individual it discharges into a country that now more than ever requires us all to be engaged in lifestyles of service.

--

Since I left NJ in July, I've been keeping a running list of interesting names I've encountered during my travels. I shared many of these in an earlier post, but the list has grown since then. The note I keep open in my phone to track these was originally titled “Weird Southern Place Names”, which later became “Pleasantly Odd Southern Names” as I became steeped enough in the culture to rise above finding unfamiliar appellations humorous and began to appreciate their originality to me. I recently read in a book on the mentality of survivors that nowhere new we go is strange or alien – we are foreign and alien to it, and we bring all the strangeness of it within ourselves. If we want to succeed in life it's up to us to stay true to who we are while adapting ourselves to new circumstances.

So the list ended up being titled “Interesting Names” and includes not just places but animals, rivers, towns, and people. I'm including it because I think the story of the list's transformation is an interesting metaphor for my own life and outlook over the last ten months - but also because I still think a lot of it is pretty funny.

Interesting Names So Far Encountered:

-McNutt Street, WV

-The Big Ugly community center, WV

-Shartlesville

-Funck's Restaurant

-The Pleasing Fungus Beetle

-Chunky, MS

-Bland, VA

-Chillhowie, TN

-Lick Creek Road, Beelick Knob, Red Lick Creek, and like 20 other flavors of licks across Appalachia

-Big Clear Creek, Rupert WV

-Loudermilk (surname in a WV graveyard, Quietermilk nowhere to be found)

-The French Broad River, TN

-The Golden Ginger barge, anchored at the port of Baton Rouge

-[What's] Bracken [fo'?] Road, GA

-Triple J Road, VA

-Ramblewood Drive, GA

-Lumpkin, GA

-Jimmy Raines Road, GA

-Wetumpka, AL

-Stinking Creek Road, KY

-Bloodlettsville, KY (boy I'll bet it was fun living there in the 1800's)

-Cheekwood [Botanical Gardens], TN

-Dancyville, TN

-Arkabutla Lake, TN

-Nolichucky River, TN

-The White Crappie fish, native to MS

-Assawoman, VA

Corps Member Training Institute and Round 1 - Vicksburg MS, Jackson MS, Baton Rouge LA

The fledgling Delta 1 about three days into our very first project, clearing brush for a children's safe house in Jackson.

About two months after our four day stint outdoors in Jackson, we had become simultaneously the rulers and serfs of the box kingdom. A Delta 1 hand touched nearly every box in that warehouse.

This Red Cross shelter, set up in a movie production warehouse, was one of our 6 (7?) housing scenarios in Baton Rouge. For a while, we moved  every 4-5 days.

Some of us were trained as forklift operators our first week at the warehouse. Forklift days were usually a lot of fun.

Mucking and gutting was a little more difficult than driving a forklift. But apparently, not all of us felt that way.

Delta 1 on one of our final days in Baton Rouge.

Sunrises at the industrial park were just as spectacular as sunsets.

Round 2: Rainelle WV

Delta 1 and some of the Appalachia Service Project crew in December. By chance, my friend and I hitchhiked back to camp from a trailhead in Kentucky this April and the people who were kind enough to give us a ride in the back of their pick-up were also ASP staff members - they knew our sponsors from Rainelle personally. It was too perfect. We bought their beers that night.

Round 3: Lafayette LA, Albany GA, the Red River Gorge KY

Lafayette:

By a twist of fate, we got to see our old sponsors, the Adventists, in Lafayette.

At the Boys and Girls club in Lafayette. If I never mount another piece of drywall again, it will be too soon.

Delta 1 in late January.

Albany:

A relatively mild scene of the tornado damage in Albany. Photo: Carlos Perez 

The fire team taught me how to notch a tree and let me use this 25 HP saw for a while. Photo: Cyntya Uriegas

At a day of service planned by our teammate and fellow corps member Carlos Perez and Lauren Stratton. Photo: Sky Yeatts

A few of us slept in hammocks in February. Georgia winters are great.

In true AmeriCorps fashion, we at last had an apartment for a couple weeks, but no beds. I could've bought an air mattress for ten bucks, but I really don't mind the floor.

The Albany Relief and Recovery warehouse crew in March.

The Red River Gorge:

Our first snowy day in the Gorge. It was 17 degrees our first night in tents. Some of us had never camped before. 

Pulling tires out of Swift Camp Creek. Photo: Nicole Allen

At a crag owned by the climber's coalition. We were all awarded certificates of appreciation from the commonwealth (not state) of Kentucky for our work in the area, and our team leader Nicole received a governor's citation. This would be a great photo if not for that guy on the left.

- - -

At graduation on April 27th.

There is a kind of education you can't find in books, school, or a nine to five job, the kind which I now consider more important than any degree. When I joined AmeriCorps NCCC I knew very little about people - what drives us, what we really need to live a satisfying life, and how a good community should treat its members. I spent most of this service year asking those kinds of questions, and I found an unexpected variation in the answers from people who grew up in different states, different communities, and even in different families just a couple blocks apart.

To me, that increased understanding has been the principal merit of serving with NCCC. This year I was one of many young people put together with others from every walk of life and taught how to understand each other. It was a real bumpy road, but we formed a uniquely diverse community amongst ourselves as we tried to support one another so that we could work together long enough to accomplish some tangible, lasting good for the communities we serve. In the process I learned a lot about myself - about weaknesses I didn't want to acknowledge and strengths I didn't know I had. I am a very different person today than I was last July.

This process has been anything but easy. The work has been challenging and maintaining a cohesive team was often even harder. I've been worn out, beaten down and pretty much always hungry - we've all had difficult days where for one reason or another we just wanted to quit, but for ten months everyone here has made it work, and we've done some amazing things.

We've distributed supplies, repaired trails, staffed shelters, gutted homes and built many more. We've slept in high school gyms, churches, summer camps, tent cities, warehouses and everything in between. Through our work from West Virginia to the Florida Keys, the Carolinas to Baton Rouge, we were able to bring hope and smiles to so many people in need, from disabled elderly citizens to kids in homeless shelters. As a cohesive NCCC community, and within our individual teams, we were often the ones there in the midst of it when someone needed help the most. Not someone far away on TV, or in the news - we were there. That is a feeling I will never forget.

I've gotten a thousand different answers to the questions I had at the beginning of this year, but there's a common thread. So if I could take only one lesson from those answers, it would be the memory of how it feels to collapse into bed, or a cot, or the floor, nearly every night for ten months knowing that no matter how difficult or stressful my day was, it was spent making someone else's day a little better - and that is a satisfying way to live.

- - -

I would like to say thank you to my friends, teammates, family, and anyone who has kept up with this blog. Your support and appreciation has helped me realize and develop the gift I've been given for writing (the same talent has obviously not been extended to my photography skills, so thanks to my teammates for allowing me to use their photos). I plan to do something with that gift in the future, though I'm not sure what yet. For now, I'm going to keep writing and learning as much as I can, beginning with some accounts of the two month road trip my brothers and I will be taking around the United States this summer before I go back to RIT to finish my senior year.

Thanks for following along! Til next time,

-Dan

"Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will direct your paths." ~ Proverbs 3:5-6

The Red River Gorge

The final few weeks of this program have been for me as laid back, simple, and unhurried as the first two months were stressful, hectic, and quick-paced. In contrast to what I melodramatically like to refer to as our corps' proving grounds in Baton Rouge, there isn't an overflow of work or a frenzied urgency pushing us ceaselessly to its completion here in Kentucky. A main difference is the nature of the work. Baton Rouge was - to borrow a military term - boots on the ground just days after a massive disaster large enough to earn a place in the national spotlight for some time, drawing swarms of volunteers and mind-boggling tonnage of donated goods from far and wide all rushing to the aid of a state submerged nearly in its entirety. Here, as our newly formed team of eleven volunteers amble along narrow trails winding their way through the tranquil, primordially beautiful Red River Gorge, the only urgency I feel is the occasional stabbing pain in my Achilles' (a souvenir from New Zealand) and the ever present, undiscerning desire to stuff my face with the nearest available source of calories.

Trail work is important. Maintaining responsible access to the wilderness allows the public to discover for themselves the beauty and serenity of what the world once was, and still could be, if we took better care of it. However, the grasping, viney arms of Rhododendron overgrowing Swift Camp Creek Trail aren't going to die if we don't get to them all today - though after a few hours wielding loppers, Zubats and my trusty serrated pocket knife in the battle to kill or trim half of them anyway, I've caught myself wishing they would and save us the effort.

We're also no longer the fresh faced, green volunteers we were 9 months ago. Everyone is to some degree burnt out. Some have had it with the program's hierarchy and operations, others with their teammates, and just about everyone is sick of communal living. The nature of the work here may not have as much objective urgency, but we've lost much of our own innate enthusiasm too. I can't claim that I don't have my dejected or less-than-inspired days, but I do my best to keep them to myself in relative silence. I have to say it can be difficult to keep up spirits the rest of the time when many people around you loudly and consistently voice their negative opinion of the circumstances. This program is not perfect, the people running it are not perfect, no project and very few days are without flaw and neither is any of us; but the spirit of national service is still something I agree with, find inspiring and believe is worthwhile.

There are few things I detest more than busywork, willful or avoidable incompetence, and wasted time, but I've learned that sometimes we have to look at the big picture of what we're doing and slog through the less-than-well-used hours or days in support of the grander ideal of national service which these losses are unavoidably a part of. And if we can agree to do that and have committed to it, we might as well keep our heads up and enjoy what's around us. Appreciation of the little details, when the middle space between these and the greater ideals we currently serve is unappealing to dwell on at the moment, can go a long way to keeping up one's satisfaction.

Some of those details: we work and live outside now, sometimes hiking as much as ten miles a day on the trails. The temperature generally still ranges from frigid to cool and nearly always damp. This allows us to get fantastically filthy at work, much to the gawking evening curiosity of other camp visitors, but usually not all that sweaty. There is a bath house in the campground that spews water at such indecisively alternating extremes of temperature as to make Shaquille O'Neal ashamed of his one-time endorsement of Icy-Hot cream if he knew about this place. I always used to mock my dad's ridiculously slow process of warming up to the water in pools or the ocean, a fleeting thought I could barely hear over the sound of my own screaming the first time I used that bath house. Some teammates are doing a conservation-minded shower fast for the full five weeks of this project. Even considering the consistently unpleasant experience of showering here I've so far refused to join them for more than four days at a time.

We sleep in tiny but determined single person tents, flimsy green plastic cocoons that have resolutely weathered several driving thunderstorms, dutifully keeping us snugly dry like little grey caterpillars awaiting the first sunny day of Spring in our cocoons (for the first week and a half, it was so cold most of us slept in our uniforms to avoid the chilling shock of changing in the morning). We have a trailer, an old pull-along RV, for cooking, storage, and shelter during the worst of these storms but it is over-taxed and frequently crowded, dirty and loud. It does have electricity but the Gorge is mostly a cellular and internet desert, so my laptop and phone aren't as attractive uses of my time as usual anyway. Simple things like changing, brushing one's teeth, and cooking take much longer or are more difficult in camp. However once one becomes accustomed to a certain level of constant minor misery, these relatively primitive conditions are actually pretty enjoyable. In the absence of much else to do, I find myself outdoors most of the time.

Some of us have started a “100 push-ups, 100 pages a day” challenge to fill our time. When we're not reading, eating, or doing push-ups, and we haven't had a particularly punishing hike during work hours, we'll spend some time at the lumber gym: a small collection of conveniently dense logs and a long, thin tree we use for lifting - they say Boredom is the mother of creativity, and Necessity of invention. There's something satisfying about doing squats with a thick log across your shoulders rather than a bar of iron. I could almost imagine myself as a lumberjack in the Alaskan wilderness, burly, wooly-bearded and clad in red flannel under suspenders that cost far less than the average modern hipster would be willing to spend. Never mind that I can't grow a beard, I'm wearing filthy khaki cargo pants poorly patched twice at the crotch, and that historical lumberjacks probably didn't waste a moment fiddling with some half rotted log after work because their job was to move heavy things all day long, effectively negating the necessity of modern sedentary humans to dedicate special time to developing muscles. It's fun.

As a whole camp life is fairly simple, as is our actual work. So far we've hiked probably somewhere around 80 miles of trail, cleaning out rainwater drains, picking up a surprisingly small amount of trash, closing off illegal campsites and dispersing fire rings. We've spent a couple days clearing vegetation from the side of a wilderness track, trimming back mostly rhododendron and ripping out baby trees (immediately following two days we spent planting 1500 trees in clearings created by careless campers, a logically understandable but painful lack of psychological distance between the two tasks). The most difficult but interesting day so far began with a two mile hike into the gorge to a creek where we waded perhaps a half mile down stream in either direction from a crossing, clearing out trash and debris. We found a total of six old tires and had to drag them out of the creek, clean the rusty, foul smelling sludge out of them, and haul them back up the trail. I tried to carry one by myself. It was wide with deep, thick treads and an attached metal hub so ridiculously beefy it must've been made in the ecologically ambivalent sixties – but that's probably just my wounded pride talking. After about fifteen minutes a teammate and I wound up carrying it between us on a spit, doggedly marching it up the gorge like a silent, sullenly bound captive destined for our tribal bonfire.

We've had quite a few interesting days on the trail, made so by forced observation to detail and good conversations, two skills I'm always trying to work on. The memory of one in particular I think is worth sharing, in part because it's the only one I recorded in detail. One day this past week, Matt, the ranger for the Stanton district of DBNF, met us at a trailhead along with the backcountry ranger interns. Our task for the morning was to follow him down a ways to a clearing beside a stream that had been trampled by careless campers and replant the area with seedlings.

The morning had begun with rain, the spattering tail end of a massive, bloated cloud that had bombarded our tiny tents all that night and still hung thickly in the sky, emptied but stubborn. By about midmorning the sun had gathered sufficient strength to shine through this insubstantial remnant, creating an effect like an enormous photographer's diffuser. A soft, silvery light spilled into the gorge as we rounded a corner to reveal a steep ridgetop running almost parallel and to the right of our own, following our descent until the two ridges pinched and melded together again at the floor in a shallow ravine. The sky was a solid sheet of white light, concentrated just above the opposite ridgeline and half silhouetting the hemlocks, maples and oaks jutting up into their ethereal backdrop. The narrow gulley was thick with rhododendron glistening from the night's rain, the tops of their bushy, rounded canopies reflecting the light like hundreds of mesmerizing pools of liquid silver.

When we returned about an hour and a half later, our baby trees successfully deposited, the clouds had mostly burned off and the silver was gone, replaced by damp bushes and a fond memory.

Earlier that day I managed to talk to the four forest service interns a little. Of the four, Jay was perhaps the most interesting and I found him a wealth of information. He's about 5' 6” and 120 lbs, sports a furry black beard, round eye gear that can only be properly described as spectacles and an expedition cap I've never seen him without. All the interns look the part in their two-toned green USFS uniforms: the dark and sturdy pressed slacks, the starchy collared shirts; but Jay is the most enthusiastic.

He volunteered at a national park for two years instead of going to college and wound up in the same place as those who had in less time and without the cost. He taught me how to tell a hemlock from a white pine and got me hooked on eating hemlock needles straight off low hanging branches like a billy goat. He claims not only do they taste great, but they make the best pine needle tea. Later he showed me a ground cover plant with little red berries that he claims taste like bubble gum, but I decided not to overextend my trust and stuck to pine needles.

Matt, the Stanton forest ranger and our occasional project lead is everything I expected a forest ranger should be. He has a way of explaining the contents of his office, so to speak, that lays bare the demystified and logical inner workings of nature as though the secrets of ecology were common place while still obviously impressed and quietly wondrous of them himself. He gets appropriately angry at irresponsible weekenders damaging the forest, noticing all the little details of their careless passing. He was quite appreciative, and I was quite proud of myself, after I climbed a precariously leaning tree to cut down a severed end of a rope that'd been pissing him off for a long time. All those pull ups were finally useful for something.

Tall and fit, with close cropped black hair usually kept under a green USFS baseball cap, Matt wears a thick, groomed black goatee that if allowed would flow down his neck to join the undoubtedly equally thick mane beneath his shirt. His irises are so dark as to be nearly black, yet they are paradoxically bright. His upper lip doesn't seem to curl up when he smiles in the stereotypical wide U shape; instead his mouth just opens wider, revealing perfectly straight white teeth descending from his straight upper lip. As our guide he strides through the forest with an air of purposeful, familiar ease, alert and happy to answer my persistent questions but just as happy to amble along in silence tapping trees with the butt end of his axe, pausing from time to time to look at some curious moss or inspect a hemlock for the tell-tale white fungus that betrays the presence of the lethal wooly adelgid beetle. He is used to walking by himself, as evidenced by the occasional lapse of restraint and resulting burst of speed that sends his towering frame bounding lightly up a root-stair accompanied by a thunderous belch. He's purposeful, laid back, and a wealth of information – when we can keep up with him.

He explained many things to me: how to identify several kinds of trees in the gorge, secret spots for an upcoming trip into the wilderness my teammate and I are planning, the process of digging for fishing bait, the best hiking boots and the tender loving care of such, how to tell how long a tree has been down based on the texture of its exposed ends and the growth of moss – the list goes on. One of the natural wonders Matt explained to me on the same day we planted trees at the creek was a natural iron pipe jutting out of a sandstone rock shelter on that trail. It was part of a whole mess, a beautiful array of large waves of iron ore winding through the bluff, partially exposed from the eroded sandstone in flowing rust red ridges. While perfectly cylindrical shapes are not common, the formation of iron in sandstone apparently is. To me, it was a wonder.

Normally such geological curiosities of the gorge occur in its rock-shelters: sedimentary cliffs eroded at varying angles by the elements over millenia, leaving rounded-wedge shaped cavities. These spectacular overhangs come in every size from cavernous cliffs to spaces a squirrel could find cozy. On the interior often form patchwork systems of dripping sandstone, reminiscent of cell structures melting, or fossilized honeycombs of gargantuan proportion.

However a geological oddity among geological oddities appeared in the form of a lone boulder, perhaps ten feet high and thirty feet long which sat in hulking solitude by the trailside, robed in moss and ferny growth, looking for all the world as though it had stood watch there since time immemorial. Along its sides occurred a pattern of ridges that looked like miniature waves of cooled lava; close set symmetrical layers of delicately curved lines with angular kinks in them. It resembled very closely the wispy yet bark-like texture of a north-eastern wasp's nest. Even Matt couldn't explain the formation of this particular wonder. “I wasn't there when it happened,” he says good-naturedly.

We leave the Red River Gorge on April 18^th. There will be a three day backpacking trip into the wilderness area of the gorge before then, leaving only nine work days remaining until departure and graduation soon after. I'm grateful for all the experiences I've had, the places I've seen, the people I've met and everything it's all taught me, but I'll be relieved to be done with it all. I think I'll celebrate my first day back in Jersey with three real, bready, warm poppy bagels for breakfast - one toasted and buttered, one stuffed with eggs, cheese and taylor ham, and one entirely plain. For lunch I'll devour an entire authentic pizza from literally any pizzeria in the state for lunch, and for dinner a thick, juicy, dripping burger from the Homestead Rest. To hell with the fall-out. It'll be worth every minute.

Til next time,

Dan

"I called out to the Lord from my narrow prison and he answered me in the freedom of space."

Psalm 118:5

Enjoying the Scenery

Older people are great. They've had decades or in the case of this 103 year old lady we met recently, more than a century to unlearn inhibitions, gain wisdom and gather experiences to share with those of us just beginning our paths. Our new friend was a great sport about being in group photos too.

I've noticed a trend in my previous blogs – I tend to write mostly about the lessons I've learned in this program and the people, places, or circumstances surrounding those ideas. It's not that I don't notice the scenery, the activities we do, the buildings in the cities or the food I'm eating (I notice the food – my team calls me the human garbage disposal because I'll eat just about anything, and all of it). I do take these things in, but when I sit down to write something that I think is worth sharing, the most impactful ideas, events, and people of the recent days and weeks come to mind.

Truthfully I spend at least as much if not more time thinking about the scenery of life than its deeper undercurrents. I imagine the reverse would probably be exhausting. I believe we're here to do good and improve the world for others to live richer lives, but to somebody else, we are the others. Therefore it must be worth enjoying for ourselves – since we're somebody else's greater good, too. So I must admit as I've gotten better at dealing with the roles I take on the team and honestly in some cases just stopped doing them for a number of reasons, I've spent quite a lot of that new found freedom from responsibility enjoying some of the more beautiful things in life, large and small, enduring and fleeting, tangible and not.

Much like life in general, the AmeriCorps experience can feel sometimes like a brutally challenging endurance race, and finding time to slip away and rest on the journey is a critical component of success. So as I've experienced more prolonged stress and frustration than arguably any other time in life, I've also appreciated taking time to enjoy the simple things around me more deeply than I have before.

If you've been reading this blog with any regularity you probably know by now that as much as I don't like to talk, I do like to write. A particularly beautiful sunset, the winter's first snowfall, or the stars standing silent watch in an open night sky have inspired human beings for thousands of years, and I am no different. So this post is just a collection of a few of the quieter moments I've experienced and recorded in this program, things I feel need have happened for no other purpose than simply being part of the experience of life. ~

Words cannot describe the scent of purity that permeates the high mountain air before a storm, heralding rain. Experience alone can convey the peculiar sensation of being caught in a driving downpour and fixating on a single rain drop rolling off the tender undergrowth. Description cannot truly invoke the enveloping embrace of the wanderer by the fog that forms only on the top of the world, on the arching spines of God’s monumental roosts. Language may inspire some desire for a similar experience in a willing listener, but only those who have actually tromped after the call of their hearts to the raw, peaceful power of the mountains will understand.

-July 2016, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Tennessee

Last night, the snow billowing through the path of a lone street lamp outside the town's tiny hospital transported me, for a moment, from the dark shuttered room on the third floor of this old chestnut church to another place, another time.

The empty, vast expanse of melancholy came over me like it did all those sleepless nights in Rochester, when I would walk from Brick City, alone, into the storm. After slaving all day and all night in pursuit of a nameless ideal, I felt the ocean of softly falling snow was in that moment, all for me.

-November 2016, Rainelle, West Virginia

The majesty of the mountains in the winter rain on a balmy day, a fluke in mid December. Mist rises from the the river bed and idles among the houses set on the shores. An enormous American flag is visible intermittently between the wisps of cloud as we pass, a proud symbol of patriotism plastered to the sides of a patchwork wooden house.

I love rainy days.

-December 2016, State Highway, West Virginia

-This is a beautiful place . . . The stars in the velvety night sky. The spider patrolling a tiny pile of desiccated excrement. Bullet casings in the console of a new SUV. Full hearts and full smiles, the scent of coffee (Dunkin') mixing with light perfume. Making new friends, feeling real warmth in a handshake and knowing you've returned it. Dancing badly but boldly, and escaping alone to the shadow of a Georgia Pine . . .

-February 2017, Albany Georgia

Why do these insects stay in the air during a storm? Are they the thrill seekers of their kind, dodging monstrous rain drops amid the thunderous crash of the heavens rending? Are they the fearless few who will brave terror for a piece of life no others can claim? Is a romantic adventure of epic proportion playing out above my head in the sparse clusters of tiny motes flitting about the dim, rain-speckled porch light?

-February 2017, Albany, Georgia

Pleasantly odd names so far encountered in the South, running list:

• The French Broad River
• Funck's Restaurant
• The Pleasing Fungus Beetle
• McNutt street, WV
• Big Ugly, WV
• Shartlesville
• Chunky, MS
• Bland, VA
• Chilhowie, TN
• Lick Creek Road, WV
• Big Clear Creek, Rupert WV
• Loudermilk (last name in a WV graveyard. Quitermilk nowhere to be found)
• Beelick Knob, unincorporated WV
• Red Lick, LA

I went with the fireteam to run chainsaws today. My arms are covered in dirt, sawdust, and blood, and I smell like motor oil, sweat and fear. It was a good day.

-February 2017, Albany, Georgia

A breeze winds its way through the little field of wobbly yellow clover flowers. They look so soft, almost like moss, from the balcony. I imagine I could lie there and forget the world, serene and immobile in the warm evening sunshine as the scent of food and laughter wafts from the girls' upstairs apartment.

My body has that elusive contented ache of a job well done in the open air. At last released from its earlier labors my mind slows its pace as exhaustion and exposure heighten my senses. The afterglow of a persistent afternoon sun radiates from my cheeks and the hollows of my eyes as my stomach rumbles. When you're hungry you can pick out all the little details of a scent, pinpointing the presence exactly of each ingredient: zucchini sautéed in olive oil, butter- bronzed white bread. But on days like today you can't tell if the salt you smell is in the air or on your skin. This is a visceral kind of satisfaction, one I imagine earlier, less sedentary and less comfortable peoples felt quite often. It seems so romantic to the mind of one of the most well fed people in history engaging in only a single day fast.

Albany, Georgia

A sunset the color of pink Araucana eggs, deepening over a tawny Georgia plain. The way the vivid, dark pink glow slots through the tree horizon to catch a solitary trunk in the thicket. Feeling like a rabbit might in a young New Jersey pine stand, dwarfed by ancient trees. Chasing the sunset down a long, wide, flat and straight expanse of road, the line broken only by the occasional truck or SUV and accompanying wave.

A drunk neighbor crossing property lines with an old dog flattened joyfully across the back of his ATV. Burning pine needles, the imminent yammering of an approaching coyote pack and the primal fear I felt as they all stopped at once at my approach.

The otherworldly brightness of the stars that begins as day mixes vibrantly with night in an effervescent show of colors, points of white light, and dusky midnight blue-grays. The reflection of the cosmos' daily embrace of opposites on the tiny pond peeking through the twisting oaks and towering pines.

The impossible bigness of the sunset Georgia sky, the dome of atmosphere stretching farther than I thought any eye could see. The vastness of the space punctuated by tiny jet planes, traveling with their inchworm tails every which way, like lone martian explorers lazily touring the plains, or blasting straight up for the stars a thousand miles away. Calvin and Hobbes' Spaceman Spiff comes to mind, the child of Bill Waterson's imagination, and I smile as just for a moment, I too take off for the arid plains of Mars and zip through an alien sky.

These things I would have missed had God not given me feet to run and a joyous heart to sing his praises as I encounter him in glorious creation.

-February 2017, Albany, Georgia

We've got less than a week left in Albany, then Delta 1 will pack up our bags and start on the road to Shiloh Tennessee, where the team will restore fields at Shiloh National Military Park to their historical condition – 5 weeks of chainsaw work. Before they get there they'll be dropping me off in Birmingham Alabama, where I'll be for a couple days before being picked up on the way to Kentucky. Thoroughbred 1, the composite team I joined (and whose name refers to the tradition of horse breeding and racing in the area where we'll be working) will spend 5 weeks building and maintaining trails in Daniel Boone National Forest before heading back to campus in Vicksburg for a final reunion, closure, graduation, and departure.

Thanks for following along! Til next time,

-Dan

O Lord my God, When I in awesome wonder,
Consider all the worlds Thy Hands have made;
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,
Thy power throughout the universe displayed.

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art.
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!

The Pendulum Swings

After three pleasant weeks spent in Lafayette, Louisiana rebuilding a flooded Boys and Girls club, Delta One was redeployed to Albany, Georgia for immediate response to the tornado that struck the city. We'll have completed our second week here this Sunday and are slated to remain until mid-March. A tornado disaster looks quite different from floods, but the end result is similar, or at least it is here. Albany is a very poor city, and many people lost what modest livelihood they had with little or no immediate recourse other than the generosity of fellow citizens who were fortunate enough to have escaped storm damage.

In support of the relief effort, our team is again working in a warehouse like we did for two months in Baton Rouge, though it is quite a bit different from our previous experience. The disaster is different, the community is different, the volunteers running the relief and recovery effort are from different walks of life – and we ourselves are not the same as we were on our first deployment six months ago.

We've had a little more contact with the affected community this time around, though not as much as I might like. I understand logically the benefit of what we're doing in the warehouse, but it is very difficult for me to really feel for what these people are going through without meeting them and listening to them tell their stories. That's why, though I still really wish we had more time in the field, I was very happy to have spent just one afternoon out in the community with my teammate Carlos and two volunteers from the warehouse.

There was a large, mainly Hispanic trailer park community in Albany that was especially hard hit during the storm. There were many deaths there but because the people who died were undocumented and not citizens, the loss of their lives was not counted in the official reports. Now many of the survivors in Albany are hiding from representatives of the official relief efforts for fear of deportation. There are a number of community leaders who are trying to seek them out to give them basic aid like food, hygiene products, clothing and cleaning supplies for the remaining trailers which are now drastically overloaded after those with intact roofs took in those whose homes may be wrapped around a tree. The two volunteers at our warehouse took it upon themselves to do the same as we are a hub for donation reception and distribution around the city and uniquely positioned to help any and all who may be in need of assistance.

Carlos and I were asked to come along that day because our team leader had informed these volunteers that we spoke Spanish. I tried to make it clear that while Carlos is fluently bilingual, I'm conversational at best and slow even at that level. They took me along anyway if for no other purpose than to pick heavy things up and put them down, but it quickly became clear that my presence would make very little difference to the outcome of the day. Carlos could translate and communicate perfectly well on his own, and the volunteers' knowledge of their native city combined with Carlos' knowledge of Hispanic communities as the three put together the pieces in this quest to find a people in hiding. It was thrilling to watch their minds work at the puzzle in real time – but what really struck me was how big the hearts were of the two women volunteers who took this humanitarian quest upon themselves. One is a stay at home mom, another an eighteen-year-old high school senior. Both have, like so many others we've met here, dropped their plans and given most if not all of their leisure time or even quit their jobs in the last month to help out not only freely but endlessly cheerfully as well. It doesn't matter where you stand on immigration policy, the financial particulars of disaster management or the politics of poverty; these people and others have taught me that sometimes the right thing to do is to put societal restraints on hold or even to go far, far out of your way to break societal barriers in order to show human compassion to real people in need.

This, happily, is the common thread that binds all three disasters I've personally had experience with, as well as others that I've heard about: when a community that has long been at odds over issues of politics, race, religion, immigration, crime, or economic disparity is literally torn apart by insurmountable forces of nature and shocked back to its most basic core of urgent human need – then the healing of these deep societal issues tends to follow the stitches sewn by neighbors helping neighbors at the basest level by offering food, shelter, clothing, medical supplies and their own time or the sweat of their backs in an all out effort to comfort one another in the wake of overwhelming loss. Towns and cities are broken and remade stronger than they were before.

I can freely admit now that emphatic moments like these where I really understand the meaning of the work I'm doing and so commit to doing it cheerfully, wholeheartedly and with every ounce of will I have are very few and far between. Personal pride in a job well done, fear of letting others down and a work ethic instilled by good parenting fill the gaps when passion ebbs, but a drive fueled by primarily internal reasons can only go so far. I've reached those limitations before in college, and have again this year in a much more emotional connotation.

I envy those who seem to have compassion written like an unspoken law on their hearts, for whom every difficult day is fueled by a genuine desire to make someone else's day better. I'm sure in reality that the people I view as paragons of compassion have their darker moments, and that I'm catching a glimpse of flawed people in their finest hours – achievable examples of what it means to be a good person. But their undeniable personal causation seems to stretch their finest hours to last weeks, months, years – and lifetimes.

A volunteer at the warehouse said today that service is negligible when you enjoy it. It's only really service when you're doing something you don't want to do, that is difficult or unpleasant for you but you do it cheerfully because you really want to help someone. I don't know if I agree with that. An author in a compelling book I read a long time ago said that when a person is trying to figure out what they're supposed to be doing with their lives, they should not be asking what the world needs, but what makes them feel alive – because what the world needs is people who have truly come alive.

God gives us all talents and gifts that we should use for the betterment of others. Many of these gifts we may really enjoy using. A person with a gift for connecting with children can revel in the mutual joy of those special connections, and someone may enjoy simply sharing the gift of youth and good health to help an elderly neighbor do yard work or repair their home. But on the other side of the spectrum, someone may have been given the capacity for leadership and though they have a family, a business and children of their own that they'd rather spend time with - they may work long, hard hours using that gift to organize a sprawling relief organization in their city's hour of need. They may get up tired early each morning and go to bed late every night after hardly a static moment during days of fending off questions, requests, arguments and endless logistics until they're so drained they can hardly talk with their own children at day's end – but through the pain and struggle of each day, they gain a deep satisfaction because they truly care about who they're doing for and they know that day they lived to their fullest potential on behalf of another human being

.

I suppose to be really, truly alive then is to be open to feeling the heights of joy and ease at some points of life and the depths of pain and struggle at others. But I believe that the struggles and even the joys are meaningless if lived only for oneself. At its core, that's what this year has been about for me – trying to learn how to live beyond myself from those who already know the secret. A friend once described volunteering as a selfish selflessness, and it's true. For all it might look like I have given on paper, I've received far more than I ever could have imagined, even when my reasons for working aren't always what they ideally should be. I can only imagine how much more rewarding it must be to serve when you've reached the point in your heart where selflessness on behalf of another person is in itself already it's own reward.

As always, thanks for following along! Til next time,

-Danny

An Adventurous Year

A pasture in Greenstone Valley, South Island, New Zealand

For the first part of our final round we're back in Louisiana working with Rebuilding Together Acadiana and Habitat for Humanity Lafayette, about an hour from Baton Rouge. It is gloriously warm. While taking a lunchtime nap in a parking lot the other day in sweaty, grimy, perfectly contented delirium I couldn't fathom why anyone would live through the bitter gray cold of a northern winter - until I remembered literally pouring the sweat that my sodden socks could no longer absorb out of my boots, not long ago and not far from here.

So far we've spent a few days bashing our bodies against flooded vinyl tile and carpets at a boys and girls club we're helping renovate. Despite and perhaps partially because of our swollen, bleeding hands and aching bodies I think the team enjoyed a satisfying first week helping transform the kids' after school refuge. We also got to spend a day with our old sponsors again! We helped the ACSDR staff give out flood relief supplies at a mobile unit and caught up quite a bit. Many of them never left Baton Rouge or left only for a short while and returned to help again, spending Christmas and New Years at the warehouse away from their families. We missed them very much and were very happy we got to see them again – even though I swore I'd never touch a palletjack again.

With some of our old sponsors at an ISP last Saturday

We'll be in Lafayette until the first week of March, when the team will move to Tennessee to work on restoring Shiloh National Military Park to its historical condition during the Civil War. It'll be 5 weeks straight of chainsaw work. However I'll only be there for a week before leaving Tennessee to join a composite team in Kentucky. This is a temporary group comprised of applicants from teams out of both River and Delta Units. For the last four weeks of the round we'll be staying in tents at a developed campground and hiking into Daniel Boone National Forest every day for trailbuilding and maintenance work. We all get our own tents, a new top-of-the-line day pack (sadly not ours to keep), and oodles of tools to play with including chainsaws, pulaskis and my personal favorite, the sickle of death – or the j-blade in polite company. It was a hard decision to leave Delta One for the last month of our final deployment, but this is the kind of work I had imagined AmeriCorps was all about. I'm very excited.

This pile of poorly photographed swag is going with us to Kentucky

Those are the main developments that have occurred since my last post. If I'm being honest a great many other things have occurred since then that are deeply meaningful to me because they pertain to places, events, or people that to my understanding remain the same as they once were, but which I approached in a different or entirely new way following the experiences I've had since beginning the AmeriCorps journey. The result were internally thrilling experiences and the realization that the lessons from this program really can be brought home to change my life - but externally it makes for a mundane story. Most of us who went home for Christmas break probably experienced something similar. I hope so!

I've discovered, as I think most of us do eventually, that we often learn much about our stance on things that have happened to us, people who affect us strongly, or emotions we just can't nail down just by sharing a little about these things with other people. In acknowledgment of that lesson, in tribute to the past year and because there wasn't much to report as far as AmeriCorps updates, I thought I'd make most of January's post a collection of thoughts from some of the events of 2016 that had the most impact on me as a person. It's a way to help me remember and process the year, but if any of the stories can entertain a dedicated or just really, really bored reader along the way then I'm happy to share.

2016 was by far the most adventurous year I've ever been blessed with in my admittedly short life. It still seems impossible to me that so much could happen in what simultaneously feels like an eternity and just a short while. As the year came to a close I realized I have a new appreciation for the power of reflection on the events of the recent past; probably because I've never had to process so many journeys, relationships, and lessons of such a personally unprecedented scale, variety, and impact in so short a time.

I rang in the new year loitering on a dirty concrete bridge, watching tiny clusters of fireworks launch out of backyards on a warm, humid Tahitian night. We celebrated the new year's birth a second time a few hours later after the jet plane carrying my friend Joe and I to New Zealand outran the sun and entered Oceania's timezone, still in the year 2015 at that point. We planned and paid for this journey to the far side of the world ourselves and spent three weeks traveling the North and South Island, eating a disgusting amount of fish and chips, meeting incredible people, and exploring some of the most beautifully rugged places in the world.

We spent a total of a week in the backcountry. I acquired some kind of tendonitis in both achilles tendons at quite an unfortunate time and couldn't walk in my boots on the trails, so I wound up hiking a ridiculous number of miles through the mountains in sandals not much thicker than about 20 sheets of paper. I was quite impressed with myself until we met a lovely Swedish girl running barefoot along the same rocky pass we'd just come from on the Routeburn track in the Southern Alps. I was suitably humbled.

Nevertheless the experience was at times excruciatingly painful. Joe and I kept up good conversations for much of the trek, but when a lull occurred it was easy to lose myself in the altered state of mind resulting from exhaustion, pain, and the inevitable meditations that only the wilderness can spur. The most memorable of these moments for me was a silent journey through the rocky meadows of Greenstone Valley near the end of a long, long day spent racing down the mountain trying to reach shelter before the approaching deluge caught up with us. Much of that day felt like a walking dream.

As I trudged through the serenely beautiful hell that is Greenstone Valley, my thoughts seemed to stray from the pinions of my mind to meander along their own paths separate from my feet. Flitting between moss covered rocks on the azure backs of butterflies no larger than buttons, I perceived neon beetles marching over grains of multicolored stone scattered beneath soaring forests of grass. Looking up to the storm gathering at my back, a gust of wind swept me suddenly off my feet and carried me, howling in elemental jubilation to its home high above the clouds. There, perched on the very top of the world, at the point where the horizon brings its clouds and the sky fetches stars to dance together around the mountain like the laughing children of giants - here, in serene silence high above myself, the bowl of the valley stretched before me, fringed on the distant horizon by mountains of impossible majesty, ignoring the tempest whipping up the streams below, utterly immovable by all save the very hand of God. Two brightly colored dots in blue and green dipped and bobbed in the sea of grass below, like inseparable specks of dust drifting inexorably through the wilderness - tiny, mute witnesses to the raw, writhing spasm of beauty that seemed in this moment, created just for them.

Suddenly shards of glass exploded from the ground beneath me. I fell from the mountaintop with impossible speed, every fiber of my being taut, wracked by agony. Aware once more of the demons of sloth and despair stabbing at my feet with every step, my thoughts were again corralled within the confines of their earthly cage. I blinked away the red haze of self pity, smiled a prayer of thanks at the darkening sky, and hurried on.

These are great camp sandals, but I can't say I recommend them as hiking shoes. Even with Doctor Scholl's.
We spent 3 weeks in the land down under-er and slightly to the left. For more New Zealand Photos, Joe has a great album up here

The next major event was returning to RIT in January to finish up my junior year. I'd left a year earlier to spend six months as a product design co-op with the games department at Hasbro toys in Rhode Island, and later another six months as a packaging engineering co-op with PCA at home in New Jersey. I'd been away from academia for a year on what to me was essentially paid vacation. I'd learned a lot working in the real world and for better or worse lost the drive to work twenty hour days, six days a week on academic design projects. The corporate world had taught me how to work efficiently, confidently and most importantly collaboratively with others – I ended that semester with a portfolio of my best work yet and many new friends in the Junior class. Life works in strange ways, though. They'll all have graduated before I return from AmeriCorps to finish my degree.

I work hard at school.

Really I do.

I swear!

I take great notes in Entrepreneurship class too.

See. But what's more fun, playing with LEGO clone troopers or doing ergonomics analyses...

This summer I had a couple months between the end of Spring semester and departing for AmeriCorps. One of my summer projects was finishing up the treehouse (it's more like an enormous birdhouse on stilts) that my brother and I designed with my dad's help. I'd questioned the wisdom of the project a number of times during the process, like during the third afternoon Johnny and I spent with our heads down the 3 foot hole we'd jackhammered through the wonderfully placed shale shelf spanning the entirety of our build site. We had to scrape out the shards of pulverized rock at the bottom of the holes with a rusty soup can before we could anchor the tree/stilt-house posts in them. However, the time and money were well spent if for no other reason than that the construction skills I learned on that project were put to good use in AmeriCorps helping people who didn't have a real house to live in, let alone a monstrously large owlbox to play in.

We've added windows, a rope ladder, and a sliding door since this photo was taken.
Shingling this thing was terrifying.

When I wasn't working on the tree house, Johnny and I explored the woods around the farm trying to find the perfect tree for making a bow, went spelunking in a local cave I'd discovered, and took long runs in the summer heat. Our feet took us to neighborhood creeks, abandoned cabins, and through an enormous local pit mine. This last one was questionably legal, but on July 4th I had it all to myself. Running for the sake of fitness is painful tedium, but when it takes you to hidden places and pumps adrenaline through your body and wonder through your senses as the waning afternoon sun bronzes your bare back – Maybe it's just runner's high, or in my case oxygen deprivation, but in those moments running is one of life's great pleasures.

On Tuesday nights I often went country line dancing with my mother. We'd taken lessons last winter when I was home doing my co-op. Looking back I probably spent more effort on flirting with the instructor than absorbing the lessons, but at the end we'd learned enough to have fun and made a lot of friends among the regulars at the dance hall.

A little while before I left for AmeriCorps, my family went for our first ever family camping trip to Harriman State Park, where my father used to camp with his friends in high school. There were surprisingly few excerpts from “Dad's big book of pathetic childhood memories” (haha, I hope you're reading this Pops), and we all had fun. Soon afterward I packed my bags, wrapped some wire (the poor man's ratchet clamp) around the bunsmobile's rattling muffler and drove off for Vicksburg. I couldn't have asked for a better send off. It was an idyllic summer.

At Harriman State Park this Summer.

Probably 50% of our photos come out like this. I think there's something wrong with Dad's camera.

The final stop before Vicksburg was a 4 day trip through the Smokies near Gatlinburg Tennessee.

I'd never been backpacking by myself before, and though I didn't want to admit it I'd become somewhat infatuated with stories like Into the Wild, Walden, and a multitude of other works that glorify the idea of the lone wanderer striking out into the unknown – whether the territory is unknown to the world or only to the wanderer.

The reality of my own adventure was a lot less visceral, but impactful nonetheless. After camping a night at the trailhead, I set out into the backcountry 600 miles from home, alone, pitifully frightened and certain I'd be bear-ed to death by nightfall. Three days later I walked out unscathed, unwashed, and with new friends, new skills and a healthy respect for the wild in place of my irrational fear. I hadn't seen a single bear.

After getting over the initial period of terror on the first day, I was able to relax enough to appreciate the beauty of the mountains. I hiked all day in silent solitude, ambling up the steep, narrow trail cut through the thick underbrush. As I climbed, the air became thicker and cooler, until wisps of cloud began to float through the trees. A storm was coming. Sometime in the early afternoon, the trees gave way to a bald on a narrow ridge. The wisps had thickened to an all-encompassing fog that seeped through the waist-high underbrush and stretched away from the ridge into what was surely infinity as I suddenly realized how the Great Smoky Mountains got their name.

As I waited for the sheets of rain I could hear approaching through the mist, I stood enraptured, enveloped by the fog that forms only there on the top of the world, on the arching spines of God's monumental roosts. As the skies opened up, I stood in the downpour, watching singular drops of sweet alpine rain roll off the leaves of the wild blueberry bush at my side. Words cannot describe the serenity of the mountains in moments like those.

That night two of the most rugged women I've ever met, from Kentucky as I later learned, arrived at the campsite. After an initial awkward period before I realized I probably looked like a creepily silent, brooding teenager all alone in the woods with a 7 inch blade still strapped to his waist, I started a conversation, tried to prove the knife was just for stripping bark off wet firewood (not for mortal combat with bloodthirsty bears of course) and helped them gather wood for a campfire. The next morning they asked if I'd like to join them. Overjoyed to be rescued from my solitude after only one day, I did.

My intrepid Kentucky friends

We traveled through the woods together for the next two days swapping stories. They taught me a ton of backcountry tricks and tips I'd never seen before, including how to build a fire with sopping wet wood. Most importantly I think, I learned the value of sharing life's most beautiful experiences. I'll never give up moments alone like I had in the rain on that ridge, and I'll definitely go backpacking by myself again for just that reason. But as with Joe in New Zealand, with my brothers in the Catskills and with friends in Vermont and New York, so it was with new friends in the Smokies. The world was made to be shared, and so is made more beautiful in the sharing.

Thanks for following along. Until next time!

-Danny

P.S. Gatlinburg, often called the gateway to the Smokies, is just a few miles from where I hiked in July. The city burned to the ground in November during a historic, human-caused wildfire. AmeriCorps sent two special teams of volunteers there over Christmas break to help with the immediate relief efforts, my teammate Carlos among those who volunteered to go. The wealth of many people in the mountains is based mainly in the value of their generational homes, which means they lost their nest eggs when the fire destroyed those homes. Left with literally nothing, many people are relying on the waning influx of aid from outside sources to start rebuilding their lives. I encourage anyone who can to help out!

http://www.mountaintough.org/i-want-to-help/