As a fairly quiet 16 year old, I didn’t act on many opportunities to travel outside my self-created computer and television screen bubble. Starting high school with a bit of a rough patch, didn’t help much either.
By the time of my junior year, however, I found some popular and friendly kids who created an open atmosphere in my physics class.They actually invited me— scrawny, geeky me to volunteer with them at the homeless shelter. From what I understood, we would be babysitting kids while their parents tried to find work. At that point my low confidence level and teenage angst was still intact so I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that they invited me. Me— the kid people called Kim [I couldn’t explain it if I tried] from 3rd through 6th grade, the kid so uncool as to actually write anonymous letters to a cheerleader. [Boy, did that one blow up in my face, hahaha!]
I jumped at the chance, despite my fears. That very next Monday, my father dropped me off at the Red Cross Homeless Shelter. It’s safe to say that I had absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do there. I was hoping someone else from class would show up to ease the transition. And, of course, they weren’t.
The only not-homeless person present was the twin sister of a girl in my class. She seemed to know what she was doing, but I wasn’t at all comfortable asking something as stupid as,“Uhh, what do I do?”
I sat at one of the tables in the cafeteria area, the ones you can find at elementary schools around the country. They were long, foldaway bench-and-table combinations made for squeezing in busloads of people. While seated, I looked around. That was it.That was all I did for a good 15 minutes. No one asked what I was doing. No one bothered me. I suddenly realized [the very obvious fact] that I was a volunteer. I wasn’t expected to do anything! There was absolutely no pressure to perform, and that was very comforting.
Despite my nervousness, I found the shelter a very comfortable place. In fact, and this may sound absurd, it felt like home. A young girl with straight, shoulder-length brown hair sat across from me, interrupting my thoughts. She was a six-year-old version of Melissa Etheridge. With sixty-one first cousins my family is essentially a baby-making factory. The children of the family were almost always swept up into the care of a plethora of female relatives. To put it simply, I didn’t get to hang out with children much as a teenager, and as a result, I was just as shy around kids as I was around adults. Melissa didn’t make eye contact with me. Instead she focused on coloring a Valentine’s day gift for her mother while I tried to make polite conversation and offered her various crayons.
Soon afterward, we were like old friends. Having gained her trust, Melissa, her friends, and I would hang out every Monday evening. Infants would surround me while I read aloud, and a little girl who only spoke Spanish would pretend to wash my hair every week. I would always playfully argue, “I wanted a haircut, not just a shampoo!”For the first time in my life, I felt like I was a part of a very special place. I’ve never been so comfortable in my life. Funny how people usually volunteer with the objective of ‘helping people,’ when oftentimes, the volunteers are in need of and get just as much ‘help.’
