thetwigster

Volunteers at Lowernine.org came from all over the country and the world, and fittingly they came with different backgrounds and motives. Meeting people with different perspectives has always been an enlightening experience for me and this month was no different. My observations of interpersonal relationships as well as my own interactions with the volunteers forced me to confront the issue of labels. Surprisingly this issue was harder to live with than the hundreds of cockroaches crawling in the dish rack.

It is human nature to attempt to find similarities in what we know and connect the unknown to the known, but too often at Lowernine.org it ended with people being falsely categorized. As new volunteers came and went, I witnessed the following series of questions asked as a way for the questioner to gauge a person, feel him out, and then assign a label.

Where are you from?
How old are you?
What do you do for living?
What school did you go to?
What are you studying?

This list of questions can go on and on. Don’t get me wrong, you need to ask questions to get to know someone, but as I saw this happen again and again I kept returning to Kurt Vonnegut’s book, Cat’s Cradle. Vonnegut terms granfalloon as a group of people that imagine they have a connection that really does not exist. For example, you meet someone who is from the same city as you and automatically you think you have a link or special bond. Contrarily, you meet someone who is from a city you dislike and mechanically associate them with all the ill feelings you hold for the city. As a New Yorker, I got that one a lot. Apparently we are all rude. So over the month, people tried to label me, and their fellow volunteers. I was labeled a hipster, rich city girl, hippie, privileged, and white girl. These categorizations built walls of separation between people, walls that were unnecessary and limited genuine understanding.

It was bothersome, irritating and flat out rude sometimes as I felt people who barely knew me and others judged one another unfairly and wrongly. In multiple occasions, I got into a heated argument with the farm director because she naively dismissed all the volunteers as privileged rich, white kids who were volunteering to feel good about themselves, (which may very well be in true in some instances but a gross generalization is never right). One time she had taken it to far, and I could not sit by idly as she insulted so many of my peers that I had grown to respect. Of course my stance, as you could probably guess from the sentiments of this post, was that she had no idea who the other volunteers were, their backgrounds, or their intentions for volunteering. An enjoyable evening at the levee soon turned into a fiery debate.

The next day at hoedown, the daily morning meeting at 7:45, I checked the chalkboard for my work assignment. To my surprise, I found myself taken off of farm duty and assigned to scraping paint from an old shotgun house. As a wwoofer I was always on farm duty. I was peeved because I was being “punished” for expressing my opinion, and defending myself. At the same time, I was satisfied because I had obviously hit a nerve with the farm director, and hopefully enough to have her rethink her outlook. So I made the most of my day. I jammed out with an I-pod with a paint scraper as a microphone while balancing on one of those treacherous ladders. Worth it? Duh.

Like anything else, this labeling nonsense was a learning situation. I reflected on my own judgments of people, how I had reached those decisions, and how I could better try to identify with a stranger without the standard series of questions. Work with someone, live with someone, and openly listen to them and hopefully you can avoid passing judgment, and perhaps realize that often people are way too complicated to be placed in a category and assigned a label. Let’s start breaking down the walls that separate us, because after all is said and done, we are all humans. If, however, you still insist on labeling me, I’ll make it easy for you. I am the twigster.

The twigster,

Josephine

PS: Job training starts tomorrow. I was employed by Big Daddy’s today. Sounds like a strip club, but it’s a restaurant. The twigster will make it west!