A closet-cleaning pride

In line with the sudden burst of volunteering we've been doing recently, we decided to all participate as a team in NY Cares Day this weekend past. It started off as a company team, but I sent out the email to the gang at home, and suddenly there were more friends than colleagues - but with such situs, the more the merrier!

And so we all donned our grubbies and headed over to Queens early Saturday morning, to help decorate school PS222Q. Of course we'd each secretly harboured romanticised visions of painting murals on the school wall. Or arts and crafts with coloured paper and Elmers glue, just like the old days.

Of course the truth was as far as it could be from that. "Who will help me organise this closet?!"
Our jaws collectively dropped, and there was a visible shriking into our seats, hoping we wouldn't be picked on to volunteer for the task. Not us, we had come to do finger painting and the like.

But as with any time in my childhood when I shrank back in my seats to avoid getting attention, I was immediately picked upon. "Would you guys please do it?" the principal looked at our team. What could we say? No, we want to volunteer, but for fun stuff only? Of course we had to be the troopers we were supposed to be.

And so it came to be that Saturday found us dragging boxes, dusting shelves, creating systems of organisation and reorganisation from the largest (and messiest) stationary closet I had ever seen. Delta was hauling boxes to and fro (Benny also helped but she was only given the little boxes). Bobbis was quickly drawing the organisation plans ("red boxes will go here, crayons on that shelf, blue folders next to the green folders at the bottom..."). Doobs and Ilajna were sorting craft papers outside. Neat little piles of red, blue and green papers spread across every visible surface, with a confused looking Doobs and Ilajna in the middle. For my part, I was hanging (and I mean it quite literally) from the top shelves of the room closet, while others passed up boxes that I could place up there for storage.

In short, it was mayhem.

Everywhere we looked, there were files, papers, crayons, staplers, and lots of other which somehow or the other evidently qualifies as children's stationary. It was a truly colossal chaos, and it took our breath away. But we slowly started chipping away at it. One crayon box here, one pile of art paper there. And gradually, this seemingly futile task slowly started ordering itself.

We picked away at it, piece by piece, and suddenly, without our realising it, the time had come to wrap up. So we took a step back and looked at the room, and it truly had been transformed.
"I wish we'd gotten to paint," someone said. And we all agreed.

But also, we were suddenly hit by the enormity of what we had accomplished. And what a difference it would make to the teachers going forward. And suddenly, we were all pretty proud.