Charity Begins at Home
Published on 13 Oct 2005 at 11:28 pm.
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My daughter, Cara, turned 21 yesterday, when I called her at school to shower her with happy birthday niceties, she told me she’d be spending her fall break in cleaning up after hurricane Katrina, shoveling mud and scraping mold off the walls in a decimated bayou town on the outskirts of New Orleans.
“Good for you,” I said. “Good lord,” I thought. I’ve seen the pictures; I’ve heard the reports of relief chaos, of rotting muck in 100-degree heat, of sharks and corpses. But I know better than to express my fears. “Good for you Sweetheart,” I said again, because I meant it, and know I can’t stop her.
I can’t claim to be surprised. My daughter has a long history of taking these sorts of hair-raising trips. It started when she was 15 and announced that she was going to spend three weeks of her summer working at an orphanage in Guatemala. My stomach fell through the floor – I’d only just start letting her ride the city bus on her own.
“If you find a program,” I said, banking on her dropping the ball, “we’ll see.” Responsible parents don’t talk their teenagers out of acts of kindness. The next day she came home from school with information on a program somewhere near an active volcano – a week of language school followed by two weeks of immunizing children at the local orphanage.
“You arrange it,” I said, praying something age appropriate would distract her, like shoe shopping or a movie. Within a week she’d contacted the school and made arrangements to stay with a Guatemalan family.
“Okay,” I said calmly, “I’ll take you there, and if it seems safe you can stay on your own.” After a few good teenage whines and door slams she agreed to my terms.
For the next two months I panicked and plotted how to wriggle out of the arrangement. “This is exactly what a child her age should want to do,” I kept trying to reminding myself, while boning up on recent Guatemalan history and checking the state department website for travel advisory information – none of which did anything to quell my fears.
By the time the plane took off I was fairly comfortable with the idea of leaving my only child in the hands of a country who was working it’s way back from a decade of military sponsored genocide. But before we’d even left the airport I’d decided there was no way in hell I was leaving my daughter there for three weeks. It was the metal box at the airport entrance with the words No firearms allowed in airport. Please leave them here, scrawled on the side in felt pen, that clinched it for me.
The next spring Cara starting making noises about spending her summer setting up and running a daycare center in a Mexican village. Once again the anxiety set in, and once again I held my tongue. By the time summer had rolled around she had recruited six friends, written a curriculum and gathered donated materials for her foray. I dropped her off at the airport then sat by the phone for a month awaiting news from her kidnappers. A month later she returned home happy and suntanned, six months after that the village was destroyed by a hurricane.
A couple years later, after she’d flown off to Ohio – where they have tornadoes and republicans – to go to college, I was informed of her plans to spend winter vacation learning to surf in Costa Rica. “Why can’t you just go to Florida and get drunk like other kids?” I wanted to scream into the phone. Instead I took a deep breath and said, “Sounds like a great plan, Honey. Send a postcard.” While Costa Rica is a relatively safe country without much civil unrest or threat of natural disaster, it is the undisputed drowning capital of the world.
Within a week an email arrived saying she was bored of stoned surfers and was going to spend the rest of the trip traveling through Panama, the land of pirates and Manuel Noriega.
This time I could barely muster the energy to panic.
By the time Cara told me she was going to New Orleans to scrape toxic mold off houses that were now located in an alligator swamp, my pulse didn’t even flutter. By now I’m resigned. What better way for an Oberlin environmental studies major to spend her spare time than helping to clean up the largest environmental disaster of our time? I just wish that once she’d take a trip that didn’t require shots and where a haz mat suit wasn’t part of the dress code.
For most of us it’s easy to look at the mud-soaked images of New Orleans and feel instantly overwhelmed. I admire her willingness to jump in and make a difference. I can’t claim to have set an example. When I was her age I was, well, pregnant. I did shuttle her off to art school with me when she was still in diapers where she breathed in oil paints, bore witness to ungodly performance art and served as a model for a friend’s photo documentary on slaughterhouse ethics. But for the life of me I can’t figure out how this paved the way for a young lifetime of philanthropy.
My adventurous spirit abandoned me after a childhood of barreling down hills on anything with wheels and leaping off swings at their apex. Now I won’t even cross a bridge without first being shot with a tranquilizer dart. There are times when I want to explain to my daughter that charity begins at home and that her mother’s nervous system is a worthy cause. It’s not that I’m not proud of her, I’m well aware that while I sit on the porch over looking the beautiful San Francisco landscape, worrying about sharks and tuberculosis, she is making a meaningful contribution to the world. I can only hope that by raising a child that is doing her duty, that I have done a portion of mine.
Cara will be in New Orleans from Oct 22 – Oct 30.
If you’re interested in contributing to her trip please contact me at pamela@pamelaholm.com
