Diction is important when it comes to serving others. It can be the difference between patronizing the people you are serving and empowering them. I had learned this prior to joining, but AmeriCorps NCCC helped me to understand the practical applications of this lesson. When my team, Green 7, arrived in Baton Rouge to provide flood disaster relief, we were advised to never refer to those affected by the flood as “victims” but as “survivors.” The fact that AmeriCorps NCCC thinks of these details is what distinguishes the program as civic engagement and service from what I call “blind volunteerism.”
“Blind volunteerism” is a term I recently began using to refer to the type of volunteering that doesn’t take into consideration what the community needs are and provides services that the volunteer thinks the community needs. There are patronizing and often harmful effects of “blind volunteerism.” What I mean by harmful is that if you bring a system into a community that cannot sustainably support the system beyond your service, then you are doing more long-term damage to the community. This is why I find the difference between “survivor” and “victim” to be so significant. But understanding this difference is new. It took hearing Janice’s story of survival to see how my words affected my work.
working on Janice’s home
Janice is one of the homeowners that we worked with who was generous enough to share her story with us. I’ve learned in my few years of civic engagement and community service that you often do not get to see the direct impact of your actions, which in no way diminishes their value, but does sometimes takes away the instant gratification for those providing the service. Internally demanding to see the results of your work is inherently selfish because it shifts the focus from the community to you. I have done my best to never assume that I will meet those that I am serving, but we were blessed to have been able to work with Janice for an entire week on her trailer home. She had the flexibility to be on the worksite everyday and even joined us working, pulling out nails and screws. When she wasn’t working, she would entertain us with hilarious and over-the-top childhood stories during our water breaks. She kept the mood light, which often let of us off the hook in that it allowed us to not think too hard about the work we were doing and the fact that the house we were working on and the destroyed belongings we were throwing out were the accumulations of someone’s life. This was something that we did not deserve, because if this was Janice’s reality, then we should have had to acknowledge it as well.
When Janice finally told us her survival story, we could no longer look at the house as just a house but rather a home. Janice had been in Hurricane Katrina and lost her first home to the flood. Against the odds, she had managed to financially bounce back and relocated to Baton Rouge, which was known to be less likely to flood. She bought herself a plot of land and a trailer to sit on it. A single mother with grown children, she lived a happy life with her black lab, Hannah, and her family nearby to visit. She had a room for when her granddaughter visited. But on the night of flood, she was trapped in her home, forced to retreat to the counter to stay above the water. Eventually, she knew she had to leave or she might not be able to get out once the water rose. She stepped onto her front porch and was suddenly swept away with the current when the porch gave way. She clung to a piece of wood from the porch all night as she floated miles away from home. When her rescuers found her the next morning, she had been up all night clinging to the wood and trying to avoid being thrown against cars, trees, and homes by the current. She was badly bruised and cut and spent three days in the hospital recovering. When we were removing the personal items from the home, she allowed us to toss most of the moldy, rotted materials, but she kept the wood safely in the “keep” pile. She called it her “Wilson,” like the volleyball in Castaway that keeps Tom Hanks’s character sane.
Hannah
Janice explained that since so much in her life has been fleeting, having been destroyed not once but twice, she experiences anxiety when trying to throw out things that to you and me seem disposable. A plastic cup becomes a memory, a placeholder for those family photos that she lost.
The trailer home ended up being unsalvageable due to mold and rotting in the floor and roof of the home. Delivering this news that she would once again have to completely rebuild was one of the hardest things we’ve done as a team. We wanted to fix the problem for her, but part of service to others is knowing when you are no longer helpful and when you must let them grieve their loss.
As our first project comes to a close, I feel that hearing Janice’s story was a turning point for our team. Although we weren’t able to finish the house and felt defeated, we learned a valuable lesson about service. We learned that as a servant to a community your place is to ask questions and be willing to accept the answers, whether or not they align with your hopes for the project. This starts with the difference between “survivor” and “victim,” and understanding that by being careless with your word choice you can inadvertently take away the agency of those you are serving. There is a Carole King song that says “where you lead I will follow,” and to me these words encompass the AmeriCorps NCCC spirit of service. Where the community voices concern, we will follow with open ears and hearts.
Janice with Green 7