Go To The Rockaways, Gentle Soul
I don’t really think that people should write about their volunteer experiences, because the Catholic within me tells me that service should be about humility. And when you write about doing volunteer work, you’re touting yourself to be a hero, even if you don’t mean it to sound that way. You’re also gleaning glory off the suffering of others.
But I had a good experience volunteering today, and I’d like to share it.
I’ve tried volunteering numerous times over the past two weeks, which left me feeling useless. Rather than helping, I mostly just stood around, getting in the way. So when my Aunt Peggy called and asked if I’d like to go with her and a bunch of fellow nurses to the Rockaways, I thought we’d probably have a nice lunch and then irritate a bunch of firemen. Which is why I wore my spandex as a little gift to them.
On the way out, we stopped at Esposito’s, the best sandwich shop in all of Brooklyn, to pick up a bunch of heroes to bring to the volunteers. You can tell Esposito’s is the best because it’s always full of locals and policemen, and there’s a picture of Tony Soprano with the owner hanging on the wall. Lo and behold, two policemen came in right after my aunt and I started ordering.
“How are things?” she asked them.
“Well, not so good,” they said. “Still no power in Red Hook.”
“Oh, your precinct is over there?” I asked.
“Yeah,” the policeman said dismissively.
“I tried to volunteer there a couple of times, but felt like I was getting in the way. Do you know anywhere that’s good to go?”
“There’s a bunch of kids who are setting up soup kitchens that seem to be helping,” he said.
“Occupy Sandy, right?” I asked him.
“Yeah,” he grunted.
I paused for a second, not sure how my next comment would go over. But I said it anyway. “At least something good came out of the Occupy Wall Street movement, am I wrong?” You’d need to be an idiot not to know that those cops hate OWS protestors just as much as OWS protestors hate cops.
There was a horrible silence. “I still don’t know what to make of those people,” he finally said.
“That was the most idiotic thing you’ve ever said,” my brother Stuprendan said to me as we walked out the door.
When we arrived in Belle Harbor, my aunt’s co-workers directed us to a public school on 135th street. We pulled up, and saw a table full of volunteers wearing bright yellow vests. The neighborhood was otherwise desolate, except for sanitation workers and residents. On the weekends, thousands of people have been flocking to the area, but during the week, they go back to work. Not my family though!
We all put down our windows, and sat, oogling the table. A clean cut looking gentleman approached us. I saw that on his vest, he was from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. “Oh, a Jehovah’s Witness,” I thought to myself. Then I realized he was a Mormon.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
“We’re just looking for some friends, they were supposed to be registered with a Catholic Church here,” my aunt said. “But I don’t see them.”
“We’re the only ones here,” he said.
“Ok, I guess we’ll just volunteer with you guys then,” she decided. At the table, they handed us our own yellow vests, along with gloves, a gigantic broom, and some shovels.
We were dispatched with a group of young missionary men, who introduced themselves as “Elder So-And-So.” They led us to the house of a very friendly fireman-looking man who needed help ripping out a small bathroom in his basement, which was otherwise completely cleaned out. He took one look at my aunt and I, and said to us: “Why don’t you two sweep.”
So sweep we did, like good Irish Catholic lasses. Most people don’t know this, but I am built for manual labor. I have gigantic potato digging hands, and trunks made for heavy lifting. No one in my family is good at specialized labor, but we are all really good at menial, back-breaking, repetitive tasks.
Within thirty minutes, the bathroom was torn down, and the floor was so clean that you couldn’t see any dirt. Keep in mind that there is still no power in the Rockaways, and the basement was completely pitch black, except for some light cast by a generator.
“What’s our next task?” we asked the Mormons, whom we had become acquainted with over the course of our labors. They were from all over the country—Idaho, Utah, Oregon—and they had traveled specifically to help out with the relief efforts.
They were incredibly kind, generous, and polite people. Speaking to them got me thinking about why so many people convert to their wackadoo religion. Which, by the way, is no more wackadoo than Catholicism, it’s just newer. I realized that when you meet a Mormon—or anyone—in a context where they are doing charitable things for other people, it’s easy to want to join them. You can suspend reason in the face of people acting selflessly.
On our way back to the command station, we were constantly stopped by people wanting to say thank you. “You helped my brother, and we are so grateful to you,” one woman said. “Thank you so much for your efforts,” a National Guard soldier shouted as we passed a battalion of them marching down the street.
“Everyone thinks we’re Mormons,” I told my aunt. “It’s kind of funny.
“Not really,” she said.
Our next stop was the house of an elderly woman named Sonia Rubin, a retired elementary school teacher who had owned her house for 44 years. On the day of the flood, the water had risen through her basement up into the floors of her first floor, where the carpet absorbed most of the water. Her glassware, I’m happy to report, was unscathed.
She had been tempted not to return to the house after evacuating with her daughter to Long Island. “What was I gonna do though, just let it sit here?” she told me when I asked her why she had returned. “That’s not the right thing.”
She directed us into the living room, which was lined with linoleum. It was thoroughly soaked. The floor underneath was rotting. We took our shovels, my brother and my cousin Brian, and went to work tearing it up. My aunt and an elder picked up the shredded tiles, and put them in garbage bags, for disposal in Jacob Riis Park, which has become a landfill.
“I taught my kids to drive there,” said Sonia. “It was always so empty.”
Now, it is a towering mass of garbage, twenty feet high, warded over by flocks of hungry seagulls. There’s a terrible joke to be made about children and “if it was in India,” but I’ll keep my mouth shut.
Once the floor was torn up—which by the way, was a satisfying feat—we said our goodbyes. “Good luck,” we told her.
“You are such sweet people,” she said. I’m not sure if she meant us, or the Mormons.
But the Mormons deserved the praise. They are doing incredibly good work, and asking for nothing in return. Their mission has no taint of self-righteousness or condescension, as do some other volunteer organizations. If you are looking to do some work this week or next, I highly recommend you go find them on 135th street. They’ll be happy to have you help out.
“I was a Mormon for a day, and I liked it,” my aunt said while we surveyed the damage on the beach, a few blocks from where we had been working. It is unimaginable, the devastation. Entire houses ripped into the water. Streets buried in four feet of sand. A water line almost to the top of my head. Basements flooded, wood rotting, cars dead in the streets. And that’s what the lucky people are dealing with. The unlucky ones lost their home, in devastating fireballs that ripped through the air while the water took care of the ground.
I sometimes think that volunteering is useless. But go to the Rockaways, if you can. People like Sonia need you.
