On Friday, Jess had us lined up to volunteer with Habitat for Humanity, a volunteer project for his colleagues at Paragon Real Estate. He didn’t force us into it, and we were all definitely interested in pitching in. It meant getting up pretty early, and they promised we would be tired at the end of the day!
Habitat does a variety of kinds of housing in cities all over the country. The development we were working on was a group of town homes for working families who could not afford housing, especially at San Francisco area prices.
There were several crews assigned to do different tasks such as siding, insulation, plumbing and painting. The workers included professionals, experienced interns, Americorps volunteers and lay volunteers like us. We all got on the plumbing crew, with the idea of working together. As I listened to the description of the work, I wanted an assignment that I felt I could handle for a full day, and I volunteered to help test plumbing installations for leaks. Jess and Leslie were on the same team but they had a more labor intensive job digging holes for and placing cement enclosures for meters and valves.
Leslie was disappointed that I wasn’t working directly with them, especially since she had given up painting to be together, but I don’t know how well this old guy could have done their job. I did however wind up walking up and down lots of flights of stairs in these 3-story town homes! I definitely got my exercise in!
I was working with a nice young woman named Sarah, who was an Americorps volunteer. She actually worked mostly on housing rehab projects but was on loan to this Habitat project. I felt like I was actually able to contribute because of my 40 years of experience as a home/condo owner and do-it-yourselfer. We actually figured out how to rebuild a shower valve to stop a leak, and fixed several other problems in the course of our testing. Jess and Leslie were told that they made much faster progress in their work than many other volunteers do, and did their work accurately.
By the end of the day we were tired! We ordered food instead of making it, and enjoyed our meal once again at “my place.” We all went to bed early and tried to recover for the next day.
