Volunteering Because Why Not

I like to volunteer. I don't expect everyone to go out and do it. When it came to the Autism Speaks walk, I was excited to participate. For the past year or so I have becoming increasingly interested and intrigued by autism. I have done some research and reports on it as well. I knew about the organization for a little while and at the start of the summer I started looking into whether or not there was a walk nearby. I was not looking only within Philly. Frankly, I had no idea how many cities they held walks in, and was just hoping to find one that I could participate in.

After finding one in Philly, my next step was contribution. I don't really know anyone personally who has autism and very few people that I am close with (family or friends) who I would try to ask for donations from know very little about the illness. I felt that walking was not an option. I would not raise enough to make any significant contribution and the actual act of walking one mile didn't feel like I was doing much. Looking a little further, I found that I could volunteer for the event. I thought that maybe I would help with set up or random tasks throughout the day, but I would still be helping at the event.

I enlisted a few people close to me and we registered as a Volunteer team for the walk. There were several shifts and activities you could be assigned to, and of all of the ones we had highlighted, we were chosen to help at the Children's Activities station. This shift was from 7:30 until 1. We met at Citizen's Bank Park, where the walk was being held, at 7 am and headed in for our instructions. Maybe the children's corner is not the most important aspect of the walk, or maybe it was just generally hectic, but we found ourselves standing around in the concourse of the park for about 45 minutes, after we were supposed to have started helping in some way, without direction. We even asked an Phillies Staff member for some direction, and he responded by telling us he too was told to head to a certain area and had received no further instruction.

Eventually we tracked down a woman with a walkie and told her what we knew and asked for more details. She tried getting someone on the radio, but with one frequency being used by all of the coordinators, everyone was talking over everyone and no one was making progress. She walked us towards a long table of face painting kits and said that we could set up shop here for the day. Going into the event, knowing face painting was an option, I had expressed my concern. While it can be a lot of fun, kids have powerful imaginations and I feared that my ability to depict certain things on a squirming kid without sketching or practice would be tough.

Around 8:30 or 9 we got our first kids. The most popular requests for the day were the Autism Speaks puzzle piece or the Phillies "P". These requests, while still not a breeze initially, were not terrible. One thing I used as an example in the week leading up to the walk was, "you know some eight year old boy is going to want spiderman on his face and I am going to freeze. That's not easy, and the younger the kid, the less space you have to work with." Wouldn't you know that the third kid wanted spiderman's face painted on his cheek. Another fear of mine was a dinosaur. While this never came up, we did have some other intricate requests. Some things that were asked for were: race care, ghost, jack-o-lantern, wolf, lion, rose, Yankees symbol, baseball, Eagles symbol, butterfly, heart.

The day was not overly fun, but it was not a drag either. It was uneventful for the first hour, and for about 30 minutes once the walk itself started. We were never swamped, but we had moments where one or two kids were waiting. Most of them were funny kids, and no one was really difficult. We did have a few groups who had individuals with spectrum disorders who wanted something painted but we had no difficulties doing those either. All of the parents were really great and the other volunteers at the tables next to us were nice as well.

It was a long day. I had raised expectations for a very fun day considering the moon bounce area (3 separate moon bounces) was a place we could have staffed, as well as a jungle gym section. I envisioned a lot more activity with the kids with these areas in mind. The face painting was a bit more subdued but still a fun time. I was really happy to see the people I enlisted enjoying themselves as well. There were some kids in costumes and some entertainers dressed up as well. Mike got a picture with the ghostbusters and we also saw a storm trooper in the version of the storm trooper uniform that the guys who rode the speeders in Return of the Jedi wore.

I would like to do it again in the future, I just would hope for it to be a bit warmer (it was below 50 when we left in the morning) and slightly more organized. Overall, it was a really nice day.

Side note: Later in the day at the movies, a woman asked me who painted the things on my face. I told her my sister. She responded by say, "Aw and how old is she?" with the connotation that she expected I would say something like "Oh she is seven" or something like that. Her expression when I said she is 25 was interesting.

(temporary tattoos were at all of the face painting tables. In addition to this on my had, I had a ghost and a jack-o-lantern painted on my face. Why not, right?)