Names without faces

This being my first blog post, perhaps I should explain why it is I've created it. My wife does a wonderful job blogging about our life so family and friends can keep up with our happenings, but the intention of this blog is a bit different. The intention here is to share some of my thoughts, insights, or struggles. The idea here is reflected in the title of the blog: to search with community. I'm not a diary keeper; the intention is not to write for the sake of writing, although Sometimes writing things down helps in thinking them through. The intention here is not to be particularly eloquent or show off polished writing, but to authentically struggle through issues, to present them in a specifically personal framework and ask those who read them to dialogue with me about them. Because it's my blog, I determine the content of the original posts, but my goal is to welcome honest discussion from friends who want to search through them with me. With that said, what follows is the first "post proper."

The last week and a half I've been working a temp job as I continue to look for full-time work. Last week was relatively miserable. The place I've been working is a tutoring agency that is in the process of getting ready for an audit  by the school district. They hired four temps to help alphabetize, copy, and file all the documents that are needed. The work was insanely repetitive and profoundly mind-numbing, but at least the majority of the time I was with the three other temps and we were free to talk with each other. On Thursday they asked me if I was available to come back for another week, and my hope was that this week I would have something slightly more stimulating to do.

This week, other than filing for hours on end I got the added bonus of stuffing envelopes with forms that need to be mailed out by the organization. All that, and I also got to be alone with the six massive filing cabinets instead of having three other people with me. It would be really easy to complain about this kind of work. I didn't go back to school and earn a degree to be filing papers into folders. Anyone who can read and has the slightest bit of concentration to make sure they don't grab the wrong folder could do what I have been doing. In other words, a third grader has enough education to pull off this job. That being said, one of the few things that kept us entertained the first week was sharing the names we thought were particularly interesting for one reason or another. Some were especially creative, others were exceptionally long (including one I found that was 15 syllables!), but it's easy to forget that these names represent real students; the folders and paperwork were nothing but names without faces as we filed one document after another, but this week I was alone and although I don't particularly enjoy solitude I had the opportunity for some reflective thinking because of it.

Last year I had a friend whose daughter traveled to Africa for a couple of weeks to do missions work with a group from her school. After returning to the U.S. she was having a tough time figuring out how to reconcile what she had just experienced with rejoining "normal" life here in the U.S. One of the advantages of getting my degree in Global Studies is that we are constantly asked as students "what does it mean for us to live in solidarity with the world's poor?" We're asked to examine what it means to be children of privilege in a starving world. Don't get me wrong: this is a question I'll likely be searching to find answers for the rest of my life. But I think that's the point. The point is to be mindful of the fact that we are children of privilege as we go about our daily lives. In being mindful, perhaps we are able to make small decisions about how we live our lives, to make the small changes we know how to make now in order to do something differently. The big changes and the big chances will come; I can deal with those when they do, but today it's about being mindful, about choosing the small things now so that the big things come naturally when the opportunities present themselves. I wrote my friend's daughter a letter. In it I shared my own struggles of returning from countless "missions," and in it I didn't offer any answers, but tried to help her frame the questions in order to allow her to search for the answers on her own. They tell me it did her a lot of good, and I'm glad about that. I can't really take credit for it because other than giving some details about my own personal experiences I borrowed wisdom from about a dozen other sources to say what I did. (Thankfully I wasn't writing a paper, otherwise it would have meant a giant bibliography for the few pages of writing!) Anyway, this is where the names without faces come in.

As I filed documents I reflected on the fact that the vast majority of the tutoring this agency does is paid for through public funds. I didn't know it before now, but the district will pay for 30 hours of free tutoring for students who qualify. (How one qualifies is still a mystery to me, but I know it is a tiered system where individual school have to qualify first and then students within those schools qualify individually). In any case, most of these students aren't doing very well in school. I've seen their test scores after all. In fact, I met one of the tutors, who said it's a challenge when they get the occasional student that is doing really well in school because they don't have anything else to give them. This essentially means that the vast majority of the students served by this agency have been labeled as deficient somehow. They need tutoring because they aren't performing at the same level as other students. One of the things I've seen reflected in the scores are low "language arts" scores coupled with parents at home who speak a language other than English. In other words, many of these students are labeled as deficient because their parents don't speak the same language as their teachers. It also means they are better qualified to be a tutor than I am! I couldn't get a job tutoring in the district because I can't speak a language other than English. I would counter that these students aren't deficient when it comes to "language arts." Rather, they are gifted. They are speaking, writing and understanding multiple languages at a young age. There are other areas of academic difficulty that may exist, and the hope is that tutoring really will help, and that got me thinking.

Doing this job for the past couple weeks could really suck. It is boring, and I wouldn't want to do it full-time. But it's more than that. It reminds me that although it wouldn't pay the bills long-term, I am still a child of privilege. I still get to go to work in an office and listen to my iPod while I file and I wait to find a better job. There are billions who would dream to make the pittance this stop-gap measure is paying me. I get to call a stop-gap what others would consider a blessing beyond measure. And it's being mindful of that which reminds me that I don't have to focus on the fact that an agency hired me to come perform mindless temporary work. If that's all I see, then of course I'll be miserable. But if I remember that each of these names comes with a face then it isn't so bad. Maybe the work is boring, but if I remember that I am really working for them, for those faces, then it becomes an act of loving service. If by taking two weeks to get paid to do mindless filing I can support students labeled as deficient to better themselves, it's worth it. If the students are better off having been tutored than not having been tutored, and I help contribute to make that happen, then the last two weeks become worth it. My work is more than a mindless bore; it is a support for those faces with names. They may be faces I've never seen, but it doesn't mean I can't be mindful of them. We may not ever meet most of the world's "bottom billion" (see Paul Collier) but that doesn't mean we can't be mindful of their existence and let that shape the kind of lives we lead. So thank you children of Los Angeles for teaching me, for reminding me to be mindful of those who the world would label as deficient. My prayer is that I would continue to learn that there is no one we can't learn from. Even those we may think are deficient are rich in their ability to teach us if only we would learn from them, even when they aren't there.

It was in thinking through this I was reminded of a verse in the Bible that perhaps now I am only beginning to understand. "Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to curry their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord. Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving" (Colossians 3:22-24). I'm certainly not a slave, but my hope is that in serving the children of Los Angeles I have served the Lord. The tutoring agency becomes relatively unimportant in this picture except as a means through which that service can be executed. In that sense my "master" is not whom I serve even though they are the reason for my paycheck. Rather, my service is and always should be unto the Lord.