At Community Home Repair, January and February are referred to as “SOOP Season.” This is in reference to the influx of new volunteers we get during these months through the Mennonite Church’s SOOP* program. Most SOOP volunteers are retired, and spend several months each year away from home, volunteering at a local non-profit. If that sounds a lot like YAV, well, it is! Just this week I went out into the field to make repairs with a SOOP volunteer named Doug. Doug and I are at very different places in our lives. He is now retired, and as we drove to our various jobs, he told me about all the places his career in the medical field took him. Unlike Doug, I am a recent college graduate, have never had a career, and have lived in only a handful of places during my life. Yet here we were, both brought to the desert by our respective churches sharing the common purpose of replacing a water heater and patching a roof. *SOOP used to be an acronym, but following a controversy over the word “senior” to describe such an active bunch, the acronym was dropped. This time of year has been busy at CHRPA for more reasons than simply the greater number of volunteers. I have been working with our Development Director, Carrie Nelson, on creating the inaugural CHRPA newsletter, and it should be launched next week! Additionally, CHRPA’s annual meeting is in two weeks, where we will be debuting another edition of CHRPA Tales. As I mentioned in the blog post “CHRPA Tales,” staff and long-term volunteers are required to write stories about their experiences at work. At each annual meeting, a book is presented containing a collection of stories written during the previous year. I have written a handful of stories, and I included one below from September. I hope you enjoy! Routine MiraclesAs a volunteer who began working at CHRPA in September, it was inevitable that my first month on the job would be filled with cooler repairs. After only several weeks working in the field, cooler repairs were already starting to feel routine. Most followed a similar pattern. You climb up onto the roof, clean or replace a few parts, sweat a lot, and voila, the client has cool air! Yet every once in a while, I come across a client that reminds me there is no such thing as “routine” at CHRPA.
One of the most remarkable client encounters I’ve had was with Diane. Claire and I arrived at her home one morning, and quickly learned that contractors had installed new parts on her cooler several weeks prior. Within minutes of climbing onto her roof and taking off the cooler pads, Claire and I realized the problem. While Diane’s cooler did indeed have new parts, they were installed incorrectly. It took us roughly twenty minutes to reinstall the parts correctly, and immediately, the cooler jumped to life, and Dianne’s home had cool air. When we told Diane the good news, she teared up. With her voice shaking, she explained to us that the temperatures in her home had reached 95 to 100 degrees every afternoon for the past four weeks. One of my greatest joys each day is when I walk into my home after a long sweaty day in the field, and am greeted by a blast of cool air. Diane was deprived of that simple pleasure for almost a month. As I looked around her home, I only saw one small fan. I struggled to imagine a month where your only relief from triple digit heat is a fan the size of a textbook. But now, that was no longer Diane’s reality, she could be comfortable in her own home again. Later that afternoon, when Claire and I arrived back at the office, Kat informed us that Diane had left a voicemail soon after we left. We listened to the message where Diane described how a tall woman and a baby-faced young man (yes, that was me) had brought cool air back to her home and had treated her with kindness and dignity. Some days at CHRPA can be a tiring slog. There are times when you’ve already been up on three roofs during a hot summer day, and the last thing you want is to climb up on another roof to repair another cooler. On those days, repairs can seem routine, or something to get through and move on to the next one. But it is during those moments when I think of Diane, and remind myself that what is our routine job is another person’s miracle.
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