The End

            It will be ten weeks tomorrow. Ten weeks of attempting to coherently explain the VISTA program to strangers, ten weeks of people getting the CCIA acronym on my badge confused with the CIA,         ten weeks on the payroll of the federal government. It all ends tomorrow.

            Tomorrow Melissa, Kristen, Jennifer, Alice, Thelma, Angela, and I will be the first VISTAs to complete our term of service. It has been a long ten weeks, a hard ten weeks, an unpredictable ten weeks.

            First there was a natural disaster. Then there were job changes, reassigned responsibilities, new coworkers, endless miscommunications, a gun threat, keys locked in vehicles, supply issues, angry homeowners, worksite accidents, and a natural gas explosion. The work was messy, convoluted, and unclear. The office joke became that if your information was older than five minutes it was outdated.

The only thing that did not change after the flood was the needs; even today individuals continue to call in for assistance. Facilitating that assistance is what redeemed the summer. Without making everything perfect, pretty, or poetic, it made it worthwhile.

Tomorrow I will walk away with the knowledge that I did something this summer, albeit with the knowledge that I should have done more. There is too much left to do. Dear readers, if I have managed to command your attention to this point, my final request is that you do not forget. Do not forget about the people whose lives have been irrevocably changed, who so tragically are often the most vulnerable of our society. As a city let us not needlessly reach the point of desperation. Everyday for the last seven weeks you volunteers have demonstrated to me the power of choosing to acknowledge a need, of giving without expectation of thanks, of living life for someone else.

I leave tomorrow humbled by this ten week lesson of how much I have left to learn – about compassion, about gratitude, about sacrifice. May your lives continue to provide me that quiet example of compassionate, sacrificial living. And may you be blessed.