Driving into the city of Boston for the first time on Wednesday reminded me of all of wonderful the commuter traffic, which I left in DC to go live in Western Massachusetts to serve with SCA Massachusetts AmeriCorps. It felt a little bit like home for the first half an hour or so. But after a few rounds of some standard road trip games to pass the time, all of us in the van just wanted to get to our site and start shoveling. When we arrived at the Hatch Shell we were greeted by a small team eager to get us started. We soon left the Shell to go shovel the neighboring footbridges until it was time for us to leave to go back to our temporary residence in Milton.
Over night it had snowed a inch or two and a lot of what we had worked on the first day seemed all but completely undone. Admittedly, I couldn’t help but think, really? we just did that. Which got me thinking, I am just serving for three days, the people I am working with have been doing this day in and day out for months now. Yet despite this they are cheery, welcoming, and work just as hard as any one of us. Their spirit and attitude was truly something to be admired. Trying my best to follow their example, I continued shoveling.
Before we knew it our three days of service were up and it was time for all of us to return to our positions in Western Massachusetts. We left Boston knowing that all of our service will soon be undone by the next storm, but also (and far more importantly) that us being out there, even for a few days, helped lighten the load of the team of people that having been working so hard day in and day out to keep Boston moving.
Daniel Dobrosielski