small victories

tonight, i did my roommates' dishes. and i'm not talking a cereal bowl here, a dinner plate there, i'm talking a mountain of dishes. you see, my roommates like to entertain, which i appreciate because they invite me to join them and they luxuriously grocery shop sans food stamps , but they usually wait to the crusty, dried on, stale-smelling state before soaping up a sponge. and as a sub-leaser, i have trouble finding my place to say, "um, maybe you could clean up that gigantic mess you created four days ago?" but my room is also right off the kitchen, and each time i open my bedroom door, i'm smacked in the face with something that looks a little bit like this:

unfortunately, no actual picture of my poor little kitchen was taken, but this is a relatively accurate (if not forgiving) portrayal

and though i'd die a little bit inside each time i'd fail to find the kitchen sink, i resisted the urge to do my roommates' dishes for them. that was of course until tonight. because after a challenging day like today and a long, tiring week of working with people, what clears my mind and soothes my soul best is a simple domestic task. some people go running, some people eat carbs, but me? i iron. and vacuum. and scrub things.

i think its the instant gratification of something being dirty and it taking mere seconds for it to be clean that brings me joy -- the simplicity of it all. i can have an instant positive effect with simple, tangible actions. i love that. i LOVE that.

because working with people isn't quite so simple. it takes a while to see results. successes can be few and far between. progress can be slow. a lot of the time, you don't really feel like you've made a difference at all. and like dishes, the problems keep coming.

so when people are the medium with which you work, you learn to celebrate small victories. and you learn to laugh. a lot.

i work with some incredible women. this summer, the interns in my office are 99% female*, and 100% unbelievable. several of our interns commute 2 hours each way to get to our office to engage in unpaid, personalized, one-on-one client service provision. their dedication and genuine compassion for client service is powerful and the energy in our office has a palpable, positive vibe that i know our clients must feel upon walking through the door.

*we have one male, bless his heart, who is also fabulous.

there is so much laughter and joy among us that i have no doubt i will continue to find happiness in my job with each new day. i have the pleasure of working with socially aware, down to earth, service-minded college students - something i absolutely love about the structure of LIFT. because since college student volunteers can still easily dwell in the possibility of change - the real world has yet to callous them - clients who have been shuffled around the system in efforts to get help benefit tremendously from our volunteers' unjaded approach to client service.

it's beautiful.

so though poverty will continue to stack problems higher and higher in our proverbial sink, and though society will likely pass them by, busy with other things (for far more than four days), we'll keep doing our part, poised and at the ready, to tackle each round of dishes as they come.