As I go, I am wearing you
-African saying upon leaving a place
When I tell people what my husband and I are doing with the gift of time since his retirement the reactions are astonishingly alike. Whether I am chatting with a thirty-something salesclerk, twenty-something esthetician at a fancy spa, my middle-aged female gynecologist, or the young man with multiple facial piercings running the register at the local surf shop, the reaction is the same, prosperous or struggling, young or old alike: a wistful look of yearning rolls over their face as they linger on my words and let the idea wash over them like a soothing wave of possibility. And then they always, and I mean always, say a variant of the exact same sentiment:
“I’ve always wanted to do something like that.…” Whereupon they immediately start recounting the reasons why they can’t: I need to wait until my children are older, raised, out of the house; I work two jobs and am in school full time; I don’t have the time, money, energy, or nerve. I understand the barriers. I’ve had them myself.
It started for us one unremarkable winter morning in 2003 during a typical Sunday involving a breakfast of goat cheese and poached pear omelet at our favorite eatery, Hoffman’s Bakery Cafe, in the eclectic coastal beach town where we lived, Santa Cruz, California. Michael and I were engaging in one of our favorite pastimes: counting our blessings. And at ages 59 and 50 respectively, we’d lived long enough to know we were blessed. We had a comfortable home a block from one of the most magnificent coastlines in the world, Monterey Bay. We had raised two children who graduated from college and were now flourishing adults living and working in the film and television industry in Los Angeles.
Michael had retired after twenty-five years on the San Jose Fire Department. We knew how lucky we were that he had survived a career where you made a habit of running into burning buildings when everyone else was running out.
That’s not to say he got off unscathed: twelve orthopedic work-caused surgeries later, Michael had bionic knees, bionic shoulders, and a bad back. Yet, firefighter friends were developing weird cancers at an alarming rate after retiring. We counted our blessings that his injuries were fixable. We were lucky. We’d dodged some bullets. And we knew it. Some bullets were obvious: Michael had responded to fires that could have turned fatal fast. Some not so obvious: You wake up one morning after 50-plus years of feeling chipper and discover a lump or an odd ache in your gut that changes your life forever.
This particular morning, Michael and I talked about wanting to do something meaningful with the luxury of time since his retirement. Two of our close friends had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and then, of course, the events of 9/11 had changed all our lives forever.
We had always traveled, but now we were contemplating combining our love of travel with helping people. It was the feeling of wanting to pay back for our good fortune, a corny cliche but true. As we lightly bantered back and forth and lingered over coffee, we couldn’t decide where to start. The most obvious answer~the Peace Corps~we knew had a two-year commitment, which felt too long to be away from our family. We’d thought about this idea fleetingly before that fateful breakfast and had casually Googled “Overseas Volunteer Work” on the Internet and come up with a million or so “hits.” It was daunting to know where to begin.
Michael suggested we go home and he would put in a call to our Rabbi to ask his advice. But first we had to stop at the drugstore to pick up a prescription. We drove into the lot, parked, stepped out of the car, and walking toward us was Rabbi Rick with a grin on his face. Mike laughed and then drawled,
“I guess this means we are supposed to do this.”
We pulled Rick aside right there in the parking lot and told him we wanted to talk to him about something. It was a busy morning, so we hunched over next to the newspaper stand to stay out of the way of shoppers and quickly blurted out our plan. We asked him for help in coming up with a reputable agency to help us find volunteer work. He said he’d get back to us. And he did that very evening.
Rabbi Rick suggested we contact an organization called the American Jewish World Service (AJWS) based in New York City. We called them the very next morning.
After a whirlwind application process, including background checks and recommendation letters from friends, we were accepted into the AJWS Volunteer Corps. AJWS places Jewish professionals with grassroots organizations in Africa, the Americas, and Asia to provide skills training to non-governmental organizations (NGOs). We both eagerly anticipated this new adventure. Part of our yearning came from the lack of adrenaline in our lives. Michael missed the near-constant adrenaline coursing through his veins during days and nights as Fire Captain in a busy firehouse in a large city. I missed the near constant on-call status of raising children. I spent those years running one child to dance classes nearly every day for 15 years and another child to soccer, football, track, and basketball practice. Our world had been defined by our job duties and suddenly we were both out of jobs. I wondered what would replace those jobs we had loved with a passion for so long. One day I was driving home, deep in thought, and three words took shape in my mind. Although alone in the car so profound was the thought that I said them aloud, “I feel rudderless.”
Michael’s skills are firefighting and emergency medical care and his avocation is woodworking. I felt my skills would be less useful in developing countries, but I do have a college degree and professional experience as an editor for a large publishing firm. Besides raising two children of my own, I was a Court-Appointed Special Advocate (CASA). CASA volunteers are appointed by a judge and empowered to stand up for an abused or neglected child in court. As luck would have it, I ended up with a sibling group of three to mentor as a CASA until their out-of-state adoption came through two years later. This experience had left me wrung out emotionally, but I felt that I was good at it.
Even with all the thought and preparation we put into the application process, months later when we received our volunteer assignment we were somewhat taken aback. The folks from AJWS called us one spring morning from their headquarters in New York City to announce they had indeed found a placement for us both in Bangkok, Thailand. Father Joseph Maier~an American Catholic Priest and founder of The Human Development Foundation aka The Mercy Centre home to hundreds of Thai orphans~had invited us to work at his center. We later found out that Mercy typically only accepts a small fraction of volunteer applicants.
The likelihood of this match was extraordinary: A Jewish couple sent to work in a Catholic orphanage with Thai children who are Buddhist and Muslim. It sounded like a poster for international religion and race relations at the United Nations. We were intrigued.
It also sounded exotic, impractical, and a little bit improbable. Although we had both traveled widely, neither of us had been to Thailand or anywhere in Southeast Asia. We learned many of the children we would be working with were HIV positive, and I realized in my Santa Cruz bubble that I had never knowingly been in the proximity of a person with AIDS. I had a lot to learn.
After a mad scramble to get dog and cat-sitters in place, stop the mail, stop the newspaper, reassure our adult children we’d be fine, and perform a multitude of other tasks in order to step out of our daily lives for three months, we found ourselves on a seventeen-hour flight across the ocean energized and curious about the adventure ahead.
And we ultimately fell in love with the work of Father Joe, the Mercy Centre, the Thai people, and the children: especially and most importantly the children. We were to return to Mercy again and again. It became much more than a whim one pleasant morning at breakfast. It became a fundamental part of our lives and our beings and a way of life that changed forever how we look at the world.
Over the years, we’ve celebrated Buddhist holidays with the children dancing and singing our hearts out, handed out powdered milk to desperate mothers waiting to feed their newborns, taught woodworking to older kids and English to all ages, sat with children in the AIDS hospice quietly turning the pages of a children’s book when there was nothing else to be done, and attended a three-day Thai-Buddhist funeral for a child who died way too young while roosters ran through the funeral during the service and old men sold lottery tickets out of wooden boxes slung around their necks to the mourners.
This is our story now~one of sometimes stunning shock and surprise, love and loss, heartbreak and laughter, and one that, God willing, will carry on.