Love Thy Neighbor

Each Spring the students at our girls' school have to complete a "service project" of their choosing. The parameters are pretty broad, and most people just jump in with something else that's already in motion like serving at a meal to those in need, collecting items for a shelter, etc. A few with heartier and more intrepid parents do things like spend the night in a shelter or set up a lemonade stand and donate the proceeds to charity.

Since I'm feeling neither hearty nor intrepid these days, I was really strict when I gave Samantha the options for her project. I told her it had to be something for which we didn't need a car. In true Samantha style, she suggested we invite the entire neighborhood (1,000 people?) to a picnic in the park and prepare all the food. I gave that one the gong.

In the end, we came up with, "Keep Calhoun Street Neat and Sweet," a campaign involving picking up trash on our block and delivering cupcakes to our neighbors. And it was really awesome. Our neighborhood happened to have a clean-up day for our block, and we latched onto that without hesitation. Three days later we whipped up some festive-looking cupcakes (my house is still covered in chocolate), and delivered them to Beryl, Donna, Matt&Lacy, Dusty, three Georgia Tech students smoking on their porch, and Anna & Miguel (our neighbors who escaped Cuba about 40 years ago). The neighbors were all pleasantly surprised, and several commented that it was about time someone spread some cheer around here (or something to that effect :-)).

So you would think that Samantha would be pleased with those results, right? Well, Samantha looked like Eeyore this afternoon as she thought back to her service project. A lot of her friends manned lemonade stands with the proceeds going to Haitian relief, and that was the project she envisioned herself undertaking when we started. (You see, a lemonade stand is the pinnacle of cool activities when you're seven. Mixing a drink with loads of sugar, painting huge signs, handling other people's money... And Haiti is an entire country. In Samantha's mind, the Lemonade-for-Haiti projects completely trumped her Cupcakes-for-the-Neighbors project.)

At first I was frustrated that Samantha was so mopey about her project. Wanting her to snap out of it, I started down a general track of, "Samantha, your project was good....Don't be disappointed....It's not right for you to not like it; you did a great job....It was really fun, etc. etc." Then I realized that I was of the same frame of mind as Samantha. Was the project good enough for us? Was it fun enough for us? Was it the project that made us feel good?

The project wasn't about us. I stopped myself and called Samantha to my side.

I said, "Samantha, a lot of people are helping Haiti right now. Tell me. Who do you think is helping Beryl right now?" (Beryl is a divorced lady who lives behind us in a cinder-block house. Her only son is away at college.) "No one else is helping Beryl," Samantha said, with a surprised look on her face.

"Who do you think is helping Donna?" (A recently-widowed neighbor around the corner.) "Just me," Samantha said, brightening.

"Anna?" (An elderly lady who speaks mostly Spanish and would eat my girls with a spoon if she could.) "We are," Samantha piped, bouncing away satisfied.

When she finally thought about others, she finally got over herself. I think I'll need to tuck that one away :-).