Good news! I’m a week away from being done with my thesis, and I’ve finished my law school applications! HOORAY!
That means I’ll be back to blogging regularly. I appreciate readers’ patience as I closed one chapter of my life, opened another, while completely ignoring the present (and my blog).
Since my last post I have continued volunteering. I’m no longer working at Planned Parenthood since the election is over, but I’m still volunteering for the NSRC, Project Open Hand, and 826 Valencia. 826 Valencia is still as fun as always, and I’m very proud to report that my work at the NSRC is really taking shape. In fact, the NSRC launched their new website today. It’s really great to see all of the work I’ve done over the past few weeks come together on something so tangible. If you ever checked out the old website you’ll be amazed when you see the new website. It’s much easier to find all of the fabulous original content that the NSRC develops, and I’m proud to say I played integral role in helping them organize hundreds of articles by tagging them with appropriate tags and categorizing them into key issues like Sex and Disability, Sex and Faith, Sex and Aging, Sex and Gender, etc.
As I look back at my previous posts, however, I realize that my experience at Project Open Hand is sadly underrepresented. Project Open Hand is rapidly becoming my favorite volunteer experience. On Thursdays, I work in a grocery center filling grocery orders from a limited stock room for people with Breast Cancer and HIV/AIDS. On Friday, I work in the kitchen prepping vegetables for meals that will be delivered to people living with HIV/AIDS.
When I first starting working at Project Open Hand, I was most impressed by the shear volume of what they do. They provide around 2000 meals a day and they have a very limited paid staff. The rest of the work is done by volunteers. And they have some of the finest volunteers I’ve ever met.
Volunteering at Project Open Hand, especially in the kitchen, allows me to get to know other volunteers a lot easier than other projects. As we chop vegetables or bag groceries we have a lot of time to talk with each other, and I’ve quickly bonded with many of the folks I work with. Some of regulars are also clients at Project Open Hand, who volunteer to give back to an organization that has given them so much. Most are middle-age gay men who have lost friends and lovers to HIV/AIDS.
When I first started volunteering there I heard wedding stories each week from volunteers that took advantage of the California Supreme Court ruling that allowed gay marriage. I was there in the days immediately after the November 4 election when we all worked in disbelief, amazed that Proposition 8 passed and that gay marriages would no longer be legal. Now, each day I work there, I’m invited to rallies and discussions about how the LGBT community should proceed. Two weeks ago one of the men I’m closest to lost his job in the massive Washington Mutual layoff. It seems my days volunteering at Project Open Hand have become illustrative of all the drama chronicled in the news.
All the while we keep working to feed those who live a crisis daily. Project Open Hand has become so important to me that I wrote about it in my law school applications. I wrote about the screwed up world we live in where people are forced to make choices between paying their rent, buying their medications, and food. I wrote about how privileged I am to work at an organization that helps ease those concerns for a few citizens lucky enough to live in San Francisco. Sometimes I wish there was a Project Open Hand in every community, but really I wished no community needed Project Open Hand.
