Blog 7

 One of the things I learned about myself is that I actually enjoy tedious work quite a bit. The two main things I was tasked with during these three weeks was sorting donations and packing letters, both very tedious, repetitive tasks. I found it easy to get lost in the work and let my thoughts come and go as they pleased.

It interests me that that was also what was most useful for SZM. They had very few thought intensive tasks for us, it was mainly just work that needed done that nobody wanted to do.

Someone that I previously mentioned in another blog post was a man whom I called J. I found out on Tuesday that he had actually found an apartment that he would be moving into. He said that he would be in by Friday. This moment felt truly exceptional; Knowing that he had been working on this for the past several months and that I was witnessing his final step was unbelievable. His job for the past several weeks was to cut out and place ceiling tiles into the ceiling. I felt that the timing was impeccable: he had just finished the last tile the day before and all of the new lights were in, and here J was taking his final steps into a fantastic new chapter of his life.


Working in a group has helped the project in several ways. For many tasks as I mentioned earlier like packing letters we were able to divide up the different steps to make it more efficient. In all we were able to complete 3 and a half states worth of letters in the 3 weeks we were there. While this is obviously not all 50, it was a significant dent in the number they needed to get done that would’ve taken them much longer on top of their other work. Having two of us made this much better.

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