I Am A Relatively Decent Human Being
So here is my much delayed account of my second foray into the world of volunteering. This all took place in one exhausting day and I hope it provides some insight into what it is like to try and volunteer your time in England if you are still considered a ‘youth’ (in a fortnight I will be technically closer to thirty than twenty).
I started Tuesday by throwing myself out of bed into my bedroom, which accomodates a huge helicopter-friendly sky light which the blind recently fell off. This means every day for the past month I am operating on six hours sleep after being awoken by the blazing sun. I dressed and brushed my teeth and made it to the offices of a youth organisation at which i have been offered a placement as a volunteer journalist/ webmaster/ dogsbody and have an interview with the head of the service. All the while I am keeping an eye on my watch as I have to be across the river in exactly ninety minutes for a luncheon meeting/ conference with the local Youth Volunteers scheme about a planned festival. The interview goes way over time as we spend an hour chatting about the service and I get my first glimpse at the web magazine I will be contributing to, a hideous ejaculation of word art and turquoise backgrounds that looks like a geocities tribute page to an episode of Xena the Warrior Princess that was cast entirely with kids doing their Duke of Edinburgh award. This is no bad thing, as it means I have something to sink my teeth into (although when I turned up the next day to begin, the head of the service was on an emergency call, everyone forgot who I was and with much apologising I ejected myself from the building, breaking the front door lock in the process. More on how that job pans out next week I guess.)
So in thirty minutes I have to make it from the Swallow Hotel in Gateshead to Cafe Neon, a Greek restaurant in the Bigg Market. I hot foot it across the High Level bridge make it with about thirty seconds to spare, and my original plan, to sneak off to the Gate centre for a bowel movement is scuppered as I bump into other volunteers in the street. So with sweaty, cramping intestines I go into the restaurant expecting a the half dozen people I have already met, and am confronted by at least a dozen complete strangers, with another dozen arriving soon after. With no food and only a couple of recognisable faces I sit in the centre of the table pretending over and over again to admire the cutlery and wall fixtures. I attempt to get involved with a couple of conversations, but it soon becomes clear that I am amongst a tight knit group of friends who stare dumbfounded at me whenever I interject. So I clam up, then excuse myself to the toilet where I take my sweet time. By the time I come out the buffet has begun and an array of meat blobs and Greek salads lay on an huge table (at which I only pick at the potato wedges and tomatoes). While in the queue I get a proper look at my fellow volunteers and realise I am embroiled in levels of multiculturalism that can’t possibly go well for me. I am stood inbetween a gaggle of Asian girls in headscarfs, a girl with Downs Syndrome, a guy with Palsy, some flamboyant homosexual boys and some butch lesbians. I am also the oldest person in the group, bar the volunteer co-ordinators and I immediately begin thinking about faking my own death.
While we eat I dip in and out of the conversation with the volunteers from my ‘chapter’ about the Star trek movie. We finish and there is that awkward languishing period while the bill is settled and everyone has run out of drinks. The girl with Downs Syndrome wanders over to our table and takes a seat. She introduces herself as Rachel and begins to ask us our names. She has chosen the end of the table where mainly new volunteers are sitting and so we are mainly unaccustomed to the politics of dealing with people who are differently able. Are you supposed to be forward, patronising, straight? How are we supposed to conduct ourselves in a way that is sensitive and fair in this situation? None of us have a clue and stare at our empty plates and an awkward silence descends. Rachel asks the girl beside me her name and she says it is Hannah. Rachel’s face lights up. ‘Hannah Montana!’ she exclaims, then raising her two hands formed as a ‘W’ symbol she says ‘What WHAAAT!’ like she is in NWA. I am delighted by this, and laugh out loud. I am alone in this action and am met with accusing stares form fellow diners. Rachel and I exchange grins and I am fairly confident I have just met the coolest person in the room. After asking everyone else their name and where they go to school, she finally gets to me. I tell her my name and when she asks where I go to school I tell her I don’t go to school, because I am old. I am self conciously eating bits of skewered lettuce with a toothpick. I tell her I graduated from university last year and she asks which one. I tell her Northumbria. She announces proudly that she has been there. I reply ‘Oh really?’. She confirms that she has and then announces ‘two times! To get my hair cut!’ Then in a voice that mimics Wyclef Jean: ‘Two Times!’ Again I laugh out loud, again some glances are cast sideways at me from the other volunteers. I don’t mind, even if my brain had just compensated with this notion to put me at ease: I have just chatted to a Downs Syndrome kind who likes to throw hip hop references into conversation and I am happy.
After the luncheon we are to all march to the new Newcastle library and occupy one of their conference rooms to brainstorm ideas for the mini festival. On the walk there I sidle alongside the co-ordinator for my chapter and chat to him. He is preoccupied with getting the whole group there in one piece and as lovely a guy as he is, It just increases how bummed out I am getting by my lack of ability to charm anyone that day. Usually I am okay when thrown in a room with strangers. I find if you ask a lot of questions and laugh at a lot of jokes you can endear yourself to most people, but it is a skill that is fading as I get older. I must be getting outwardly creepier.
We get to the meeting hall and all sit around a huge arrangement of tables in a circle. My intial belief I had been invited to this meeting in my capacity as a responsible and well educated adult to help arrange a charity event faded away and I realised I had actually willingly walked into a meeting of a well meaning but ultimately benign glorified three hour youth club meeting. This concern began when it was announced that rather then begin appointing a minute taker and treasurer, we would be playing an icebreaker game. We were to go around the group of two dozen of us, introducing ourselves with our first name then an alphabetically corresponding animals name as a surname. I was Michael the Mongoose. However, the catch was before you announced yourself you had to recap everyone who came before you. As you can imagine in my placement as twentieth in line, it was a convuluted 45 minutes before my turn came around, and when it did I had my head in my hands and had to be prompted to sit up and speak. The only upside of the game was the contribution by Rachel, which went something like this:
John - This is Laura the Llama, Johnny the jellyfish and I am John the Jekyl
Anna - This is Laura the llama, Johnny the jellyfish, John the Jekyl and I am Anna the Antelope
Rachel - I’M A SNAKE!
Volunteer co-ordinator - No, Rachel, the animal has to begin with the same letter as your name… do you want to be Rachel the Rabbit?
Rachel - NO! I’M RACHEL THE SNAKE!
Volunteer co-ordinator - No, you can be Rachel the Rabbit
Rachel - WHAT? Awwww.
Don’t let them push you around forever, Rachel, I thought, you will always be a snake in my eyes. The game took about an hour to conclude and by the end everyone was pissed off and ill prepared to begin discussions. Nevertheless, six categories for brainstorming were defined (safety, food, entertainments etc) and were were separated into groups. I was dropped into a group with two 16 year old girls and we were assigned safety as our first brainstorming topic. The girls suggested things such as having crowd marshalls, water and sunblock reserves, barriers around the stage. Testing the waters, I piped in and suggested we hire Robocop. Met with blank stares, I sank back into sulk-mode and stayed quiet for the rest of proceedings.
After we had done three topics a tea break was announced and while the other volunteers bounced about excitedly with their volunteer pals, I sat down and pretended to check messages on my phone. One of the asian girls wandered over and sat down next to me. In the alphabet name game I was fairly sure she had introduced herself as Mariam the Monkey, but I had been so concerned with the girls’s headscarves that I couldn’t be sure which girl was which so I hazarded a guess before she introduced herself personally. However I did this by raising a finger, pointing it in her face and proclaiming ‘monkey?’ A millisecond went by in which I realised that I had just pointed at a girl of ethnic origin and called her a monkey. Panic set in and my brain began to tell me that this was in fact Zara the Zebra or Salit the Stallion and I was about to be hoisted up onto BBC news as being Nick Griffin’s best mate, infiltrating youth volunteer schemes as some sort of 1970s racist saboteur. Luckily it was Mariam the Monkey and we began to chat but I was still in crisis mode. ‘Don’t mention Islam, don’t mention the headscarf, we don’t know the protocols here, Michael, don’t tell her she looks like the girl from Persepolis!’
Her opening gambit was ‘Hello, do you like Nine Inch Nails?’ and the conversation continued into a discussion about Apocalypse Now, 80s hardcore punk and Spike Jonze. This was probably the most remarkable part of the day for me, as it sort of affirmed what I’d sort of hoped when I decided to volunteer… maybe I will have my pre-conceptions about some social group busted like people do in films. Now I’d met a hip-hop disabled girl and a punk rock muslim teenager, the day wasted listening to uninformed children drone on about health and safety permits felt oddly worth it.
The last opening of my eyes came when we were discussing a celebrity guest for the festival. The camp boys were suggesting Girls Aloud over and over again, in a manner that only became funnier every fucking time they did it. I suggested Tim Healy, the geordie comedian from Auf Weidersehn Pet, a local reknowned for his charity work. Noone knew who he was and the frustration of two hours of being looked at like I was an idiot came to the fore a little as I blustered my way through an explanation of who he was. The only person who did know who I talking about was the guy with palsy, who in my terror I had avoided all afternoon. He leaned towards me and said ‘Yes. Oh, also, how about Simon Donald’. The gaggle of Jonas Brother loving teens around us, again, had no idea what we were talking about and swiftly moved on to shouting ‘Cheryl Cole’ again. I began to feel awful as I had, in my inexperience, written off the guy with the odd speech and movement in the group as some sort of second class citizen, and he had turned out to be the person in the room I would most likely have gotten along with, the only other person in the room who knew who Simon Donald was.
That pretty much sums up my second day in the world of volunteering. Being cast into the ‘youth’ bracket is pretty infuriating, as is having the time I have donated to help the less fortunate being used to pad out a social event for an entrenched group of teenage Christians. However the chance to meet and interact with people I would never normally come across, and then to be so pleasantly surprised by them has ensured I will definately stay involved in the project. Even when I am working in my placement as a journalist I will still be attending meetings of the youth group, just to see what happens…
