Email: Ben Darby

Dear Friends,

The scene. A Christmas party for the children of the Homework Club, complete with sugar cookies coated in icing, ice cream sundaes, and that cool punch you make by pouring Sprite and Hawaiian Punch over a block of sherbet ice cream. Laughter and merriment can be heard everywhere (as well as frequent pleas for the distribution of additional cookies). There is a paper chain made out of green and red construction paper hanging over the main table. Each link in the chain bears the name of a child that helped in its construction. After the children are done gorging themselves, they are lined up and proceed one by one into a room where they each receive an individually packaged Beanie Baby. Smiles and happiness abound.

The scene changes. The children are now all tightly packed onto the bus, tweaking on their excessive consumption of simple carbohydrates, screaming, and flying about like little electrons around the confused and disoriented nucleus of Ben. Fights threaten to break out as rambunctious jostling is misinterpreted as malicious shoving. There is supposed to be no talking on the bus, but everyone will be lucky to escape with eardrums intact.

As a result of this tremendous cacophony, Ben has to pull the bus over on four separate occasions during the drive home and reestablish order. Ben misses a turn while threatening to pull over yet again. A child on the bus has an accident and wets herself, then immediately proceeds to cry for a good ten minutes. Another child begins to feel sick and demands the trash can be passed to her in case she throws up. In backtracking to the missed turn, Ben realizes that he can't turn left where he needs to, and has to overshoot the street and pull into a small parking lot. The parking lot is small enough to prevent him from turning around, so he has to wait ten minutes for a hole in the traffic large enough to let him back out onto the busy thoroughfare again.

Ben finally makes it back to the church after dropping off the last of the children. He thinks the party was a smashing success, but is glad there is no Homework Club tomorrow.

Hello! My name is Ben Darby, and what you’ve just read is a true “slice of life” from my personal experience as a Young Adult Volunteer in Cincinnati, Ohio. It is difficult to say I anticipated doing this type of work directly out of college when I signed up for the YAV program. I’m sure, like the vast majority of my fellow YAVs, I had some vague idea of my talents and an even vaguer idea of I wanted to do with them. I was and am very passionate about the value of education, and stressed that during my interview process. Little did I know I would get what I asked for—a collection of rowdy and boisterous kids to tutor.

Yet my responsibilities here are broader than simply that. My placement has me sharing time between two churches with an established partnership: St. Johns Westminster Presbyterian Church and Washington United Church of Christ. I spend most of my time at Washington United Church of Christ, where I serve as their youth pastor, Sunday school teacher, and transportation specialist. I suppose you could call this an environment an “urban” one—it’s certainly paradigmatic in respect to what many consider “urban”—yet I don’t like to use that term. It’s a place like any other, and its people are like all other people with perhaps one exception: they have great need.

I find my work here very satisfying and I can honestly say it has done more to bolster my faith than any experience I’ve had so far. There is a magnet sticking to one of Washington’s refrigerators which sums up what I have come to know here. It states, “I don’t believe in miracles; I depend on them.” Nicely put, if I do say so myself.

Peace,

Ben Darby