Al Gore's trash is another man's treasure

Here is another post of random bits of information that don't necessarily fit into any other posts. Enjoy!

SIXTH FLOOR OF THE LOEWS VANDERBILT

This Monday, I got made fun of for being excited about going to Al Gore's office to pick up items he was donating to the Campus for Human Development. As the true politics lover that I am, I volunteered to go with two other staff members and an Odyssey guy (from the long-term homelessness recovery program of the Campus) to pick up five boxes and a computer from the office of "The Honorable Al Gore and Tipper Gore" in suite 620 of the Loews Vanderbilt Hotel downtown. Unfortunately my neighbor Al must have not known that I would be there since he was not there to greet me. He left that duty to his receptionist. We did a lot of laughing about how we must have looked pulling up to a swanky hotel in our huge old light blue van that was full of trash and smelled terrible.

When we got back to the Campus, of course, I couldn't wait to go through Al's old things, which were mostly books. He donated exactly what you would expect Al Gore to: mostly books on the environment, along with several prepublication copies of political books. There was one anti-George Bush book included, which I thought was funny.



FROM HIGH PLACES TO LOW ONES

Lest you think all of my time in Nashville is spent hanging out with Emmylou Harris and Nicole Kidman -- and you can trust me on this one -- it is not.

Last week at the Campus I had some unprecedented contact with some human waste. On Tuesday, a gentleman wet his pants and handed them to me (and they went in the trash pretty quick). On Wednesday, I helped a guy who didn't make it to the bathroom get some new clothes--not just wet this time. After I was telling a co-worker about the aforementioned incidences, she said, "Jeff, I wouldn't come in tomorrow to see what you'll get on day 3."


JEREMY IRONS AND THE MUMMY

One day last week, I got the chance to go on a Campus field trip to the Frist Center for the Visual Arts' exhibit "Egypt," which is apparently the largest collection of authentic ancient Egyptian artifacts ever exhibited in the US. It was fairly interesting. I enjoyed the mumified dog and cat especially. The exhibit was one where each person wears headphones and gets narration by pressing certain numbers into their personal keypads according to what exhibit he or she is at. Egypt was narrated by "academy award winning actor" Jeremy Irons. The four staff members and four Odyssey guys who went enjoyed their afternoon.


DANGER LURKING: THE BROWN RECLUSE

On our first evening here, after being told that the last person to work where I am working through NEP was hit, our site coordinator Susan also shared that our house was full of brown recluse spiders. Way to save the juicy details until after we're already here!

We have caught several brown recluses, one of which is pictured at right. They sprayed for them before we came, and the good people at the Cook Pest Control company left us a whole stack of sticky spider traps, which is where we have been finding the brown recluses, which are easy to identify because, aside from the fact that they are huge, have fiddles on their backs. Though none of us has been bit yet, the brown recluse problem has been a good source of conversation and joking around Second. Drunk people are the least of my concerns -- we've got poisonous spiders lurking!


ON A MORE POSITIVE NOTE

As part of the NEP experience, each of us has been assigned a mentor for the year. I was fortunate enough to get two mentors (I must have been an obvious case of special need!) who have some connections to home. Revs. John and Annie McClure are Presbyterian pastors. He is a professor of homiletics at Vanderbilt Divinity School, and she works for the Presbyterian Publishing Corporation, though her office is at United Methodist Publishing here in Nashville. John was a friend and professor of Lant Davis (Central Pres-TH pastor) at Louisville Seminary. I should report that I hear Lant was an exceptional student, by the way. John also taught my roommate Patrick's pastor from home. John and Annie's daughter, Leslie, is a singer, and we NEP volunteers enjoyed attending a concert of hers a few weeks ago at which John played guitar in the band. The McClures took me out for dinner tonight.


FRUIT TEA, ANYONE?

One of the biggest cultural differences I've noticed here is in the iced tea department. Aside from the familiar sweetened vs. unsweetened thing (and they do love their extremely sweet tea here), they also serve fruit tea to no end. It's like iced tea mixed with orange juice or something, and is pretty good.


MEETING OF THE MINDS

We had a meeting today at the Campus of the "high ups" and the four interns. They call us volunteers "interns" for lack of a better word, though they say they don't like that title since they consider each one of us a part of the regular staff. Typically the Campus will have one intern in any given year, but this year there are four, which has given them an unexpected amount of help which they're really loving. I am here with the Presbyterians, there is a Jesuit volunteer in a program similar to NEP, there is a recent high school graduate who is taking a year off before she starts at Vandy next year, and there is a Vanderbilt student who is interning there as a part of a class.

Anyway, today we met with Father Charlie Strobel, who is the founder of the Campus and a nationally recognized leader on homelessness issues. He is officially retired from his day to day duties at the Campus as its executive director, but I've seen him there most days. We are going to be meeting with him as the intern group on a near weekly basis to debrief our experiences and to share in fellowship with one another away from work. We discussed how difficult it is to talk about what we do on a daily basis with people who don't have any idea what we're doing or what working with the homeless is like. As our director Rachel said, people who work at the Campus say things like, "I was in the alley the other day and there was this guy who was trying to hide his crack pipe from me and this other guy who was standing there naked, and I looked down and noticed I stepped in some gum and I was really upset about having to clean off my shoe." People in the "outside world" don't always see the world the way people who work in the world of the Campus do.

Charlie described the world in our meeting today as:

1. small
2. armed
3. unequal
4. interconnected
5. poor

Are we engaged in the world as Charlie Strobel describes it? Or, are we living a life of comfort?


TAKING A VACATION

The blog will be quiet for a few days. The four NEP volunteers are heading to Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, New Mexico tomorrow morning. Our flight leaves Nashville at 7:30am, so we will be up early. We will be joining other Young Adult Volunteers from the other sites around the U.S. for our National YAV Orientation Event. We will be getting back here late on Sunday, so I will hopefully be posting some pictures and reflections from our little vacation.