Week 10: What Exactly Do You Do?
I often get asked this question: what exactly do you do for your work? So the purpose of this blog will be to walk you through a typical day at Mercy Neighborhood Ministries and describe other tasks I have assigned to me. Let's go!
I start work at 9am but usually get there a little before. I have a small office and check my emails, and then head into the food pantry, which opens at 9:00. Our food pantry is a choice pantry, which means our clients walk through with a cart and choose what they'd like, rather than being given a bag of pre-selected food. We find this works out better because they are more likely to eat what they get, and it also gives the feeling of real shopping in the grocery store, which is an experience that offers more dignity and personalization to the process. I shop people through the pantry, help them read labels and offer suggestions. I also make sure they get the right amount of food, because we help both seniors (over 60 years old) and crisis clients, and depending who they are they get a slightly different selection. Most of our clients are low-income, but some are homeless or struggling with addictions. I help people shop the pantry until 12:00, which is when we close and clean. I keep this schedule every Monday-Wednesday, and the pantry is closed on Thursday and Friday.
Two days of the month we have a Creative Aging or Wellness event, which is a special day for seniors to come to the pantry. We serve them a meal and dessert, provide entertainment in the form of a band or other performer, and just give them a day to visit and be seen and have conversation. Most of them are sick, bed-ridden, home alone, or don't have family, so this day is fun for them to come together and have a nice time. They can be seen by a nurse and talk to our social services people about any problems they are having. Oftentimes we have local elementary or middle school students volunteer at these events, or medical students from the University of Cincinnati. When these students come to volunteer I'm in charge of directing them.
A few times a month I also do home visits with our director. We bring groceries to the clients in their home and visit with them for a little while. Some can't get out of bed, some need wheelchairs to get around. One is a recent widow who nursed her dying husband in a one room apartment for the last year. One is blind. Despite these limitations they don't have many services or supports in place, so these visits are one of my favorite things to do, and it brings me a lot of joy to interact with them all.
When the pantry is closed in the afternoons and on Thursdays and Fridays, I work upstairs with the Adult Services department. Mercy Neighborhood Ministries runs a G.E.D. program for young adults whose high school education was interrupted. Most of our students had to drop out due to personal reasons or perhaps they were in prison or some other juvenile program. We also offer two other programs for adults: a workers readiness program to help with job assistance, resume building, character building, and referrals, and the second is a home-care aide training and job program that employs about 20 aides sent out to work in the neighborhood. I go upstairs in the afternoons to help with these programs, doing tutoring on basic subjects, helping with the resume building classes, and whatever else as needed. I also frequently sit at the desk for the home-care aides and receive their check in calls, update the time-log, contact aides and clients if schedules need to be switched, etc. I'm also in charge of correcting the weekly homework for the home-care aides training program.
When I'm not doing any of the above things, I'm doing whatever else is needed by anyone in the building. This could include helping make auction baskets or preparing in other ways for one of the fundraisers we're having, making copies, updating the local list of food pantries in southern Ohio and northern Kentucky (this took a month) or calling clients for various check-ups, invitations, etc. The agency is a very small one and everyone pitches in to do their own job plus whatever anyone else needs. There are no secretaries, we only have a janitor part of the week, and our building is shared with a local church and elementary school so sometimes we have to evacuate in the middle of the day for fire drills. Lol. However, everyone who works here has a genuine interest in making the world a better place and being present to those who are so often forgotten: the elderly, sick, poor, uneducated, and minority. There's a lot to do, no day is the same, and I often reflect on how happy I am to be here.
What we would like to do is change the world--make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended them to do. And, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, the poor, of the destitute--the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor, in other words--we can, to a certain extent, change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world. We repeat, there is nothing we can do but love, and, dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as our friend.
// Dorothy Day
