“What do you do?” This is almost inevitably how a conversation with anyone new starts: “What do you do?”
“I volunteer.”
I get a blank stare as they wait for the ‘and’ that involves going to school, or making money or something else. “No, really, I volunteer. I am a Jesuit Volunteer at San Francisco Network Ministries, working mainly at the Tenderloin Tech Lab, a partnership with St Anthony Foundation.” From here I often continue with something about how I teach classes, coordinate volunteers, do IT work at the lab, help with computer issues at various other places, and generally try to help out with whatever needs doing.
Meanwhile, I can tell that what people take away is something like “He teaches at the Tech Lab at St. Anthony’s” or maybe only “He works at St. Anthony’s.” This is not entirely untrue, and is generally what I let people leave with. This description fits nicely into peoples little boxes labeled ‘job’ where they put what one spends there weekdays doing. Despite this, it does not really get to the heart of what I actually do.
My workdays are spent doing a whole variety of tasks including installing workstations, configuring servers, researching technical problems, and fielding questions from staff and clients. All of these tasks are important and need to get done. Many are urgent, and many are interesting. There is a saying in IT that, “you’re doing a good job if no one notices.” Some days that goes better than others.
All those technical tasks are pretty doable and there is always another project to add to the list no matter how fast I get them done. Given that technical projects could absolutely keep me busy until the end of time, it is important for me to make time to step away from all of the technical problems (something that I, as a Computer Science major, am not necessarily used to doing all that often) for other things. These other parts of my job while no less important, are generally much harder to quantify – like listening, being present, and empowering others.
One of the parts of my job that I have enjoyed most over the last few months has been listening to client’s stories. Although I am not generally in situations to hear complete life stories, I do get the opportunity to hear bits and pieces. Be it the older gentleman who spent most of his career doing drafting and tells me in class about how he is still mad about the class he failed by 3 percent 10 years ago. To the man who, upon being shown Google Maps, found his childhood home and told me stories about growing up. Through these stories clients provide me with a wonderful window into their lives.
It seems to me that telling our stories – and having our stories listened to – is far more important than we, as a society, tend to give credit. People have an emotional need to be heard. For middle class white males like myself, it is not hard to find people and places to fill that need. For many of our clients, however, those opportunities are few and far between.
Listening, and being present with a person is a much larger gift than most of us tend to realize. It can feel trivial, unimportant, and unproductive to listen to someone as they talk about their childhood or one of their old jobs. We forget, however, how good it can feel to be heard – especially if it is something one does not encounter in much of their day-to-day life. Often, the clients of the Tech Lab have few places where someone is willing to really listen to them – making it that much more appreciated when someone does.
I just mention that my job involves empowering others. When we talk about empowering people we generally conjure up an image of some profound change that, all of a sudden, makes their life better. As good as this version is for giving everyone the warm fuzzies, empowerment in my job is much more down to earth. Empowerment is helping the man who wants to post his pictures online with captions learn how to use Picasa.
Empowerment is helping the client who, when I first met him, couldn’t keep this left click vs. right click thing straight. He has become confident enough with computers to feel comfortable asking how to do things even beyond the scope of the class. Empowering people means meeting people where they are and helping them go where they want to go at the speed that they are ready to get there. Often, it has little or nothing to do with grand visions or monumental social change (although that work is important also). Often it is just about a man who wants to use a mouse.
Saturday April 3rd, 2010 is the date of the widely anticipated State Wide NA Convention in Santa Clara, CA. Each year 
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