On Wednesday the 6th of August the Cambridge group met up with representatives of the Cambridge City Council and spent the day volunteering. We offered our help from 9am-3pm during the day. Once arriving at the location, we discovered it was homes/flats that were subsidized housing for the people of Cambridge who need a little extra help- some were elderly, some mentally ill, some just going through a rough patch in life.
We were split into four groups immediately. About 10 were sent to a garden to take down shrubs and trees that were overgrown near some of the housing that the city needed eradicated. Four were sent to make some tables for the elderly housing facility, three were sent to help a mentally ill tenant clean out his flat, and the remainder to paint a “summer house” (shed) that was outside the elderly home.
I was in the group that stayed at the home. As our host-manager was showing us around and getting us settled in, he shoved us in an elevator (“lift”). After 11 people were in the lift, squished but not uncomfortable, I told him that I would take the stairs since I am quite claustrophobic. “No, no- hop in” he said. “I’ll walk” I replied. “Look, theres one more spot for you” he said again. Thinking that I would get in because I was holding up the elevator, I hoped in the last square foot space along with my 11 other classmates. The door closes, we start to rise and clunk clunk clunk the evaluator drops a bit, and makes a few banging noises, and repeats. Everyone starts to laugh and jokes start to circulate about being stuck in the elevator, meanwhile I start to panic. We push buttons to try and get the elevator back to the original floor, or up to the first. We try pushing the “door open” button, but nothing seems to be working. “In case of emergency, push alarm” the last button reads, and I go for it. Weeeoh weeeoh weeeoh weeeoh rang multiple times throughout the next few minutes, and eventually fifteen minutes later we were set free.
With the day off to an already interesting start, we began our assignments. I spend the first hour or so sanding and painting the summer house. Then, everyone who wasn’t a part of the apartment-cleaning team got asked to help with that particularly interesting job. It turns out that the tenant who had been living in the flat had been hoarding things in plastic bags for 22 years of his life in the flat, and never thrown any material goods away. The bedroom was full to the ceiling of neatly stacked bags, and then living room was half full. He was a serious hoarder. I was told at the beginning of the day, the kitchen and bathroom were hard to get to, and there were closets filled with old airplane models. The reason we had been assigned to this job was because his social worker was worried about his ability to use the kitchen and bathroom. It took us nearly the rest of the day for everyone to clear out 8 loading trucks full of this man’s possessions that he had stuffed into his tiny, 3rd story apartment. None of us had ever seen anything quite like it… we were all speechless as we saw how he had been living.
In the same way, at the end of the day we actually felt like something had been accomplished. If the social workers and city workers had to do it themselves, it would have taken them days and days. Due to our man power and sheer numbers, we got it done in about five or six hours total. It was something that needed to be done, even though it was painful to watch the tenant as he watched us excavate everything that was in his flat. We were completely bewildered at what we saw before the hours of work, but overall we all felt good about what we had done. After getting back to Hughes and taking an immediate shower, we discussed the days work and slept like babies knowing that the city of Cambridge was a little better off.
~Gabbi Stienstra