days

When I was in high school, my dad, sister and I spent a lot of time volunteering. We worked at a camp for the developmentally disabled, taking groups of teenagers and adults on summertime field trips like horseback riding and swimming. (I even got a black eye in the pool one day when another volunteer tossed a kid onto my head. Ouch!) One of the reasons I chose to go to Warren Wilson College was because of its emphasis on community service, and as a junior and senior, I worked in the college’s Service Learning Office designing and editing a national journal about why and how colleges and students should incorporate community service into their academic programs.

After a hiatus of sorts — family and work responsibilities can overwhelm at times — I find myself compelled, again, to be more involved. President Obama’s call to service was and is such a moving message to me that it’s inspiring me, again, to find more ways to contribute to my own community.

One of the best places I’ve volunteered with so far has been at the Asheville-based MANNA Food Bank. While I’m a deep believer in organizing for real, systematic change in the community, I also believe in meeting people’s needs now, particularly for basic needs such as housing and food. Consider this:

• There are more than 35 million people who are hungry in the United States. Nearly 40 percent of these people are children, and 10 percent are elderly.
• The numbers of people living in poverty in the 18 western counties range from nearly 10 percent to 20 percent of the population.
• The numbers of hungry people in Western North Carolina are twice the national rate, which is one in 12. That means one in every six people living in Western North Carolinian is hungry. I know there are people in my neighborhood who use local organizations to get help. There are probably some in your neighborhood, too.

Last week, Pat and I volunteered at MANNA to sort apples and make packages of food for elementary school kids to take home over the weekends. These tiny, back-pack sized packages of canned vegetables and spaghetti and meatballs go home with children who receive free or low-cost lunches at school — nationally, 30.5 million children received these lunches every day in 2007.

While we volunteered, we learned, as has been reported locally, that even though food donations have remained steady at the food bank, demand has really spiked across the region, leaving MANNA’s food resources stretched. It’s worth noting here that Charity Navigator, an organization that serves as a consumer watchdog on charities, gives MANNA only two of four possible stars (four being the best), mainly — from what I can tell — because growth in both revenues and expenses have decreased and their working capital ratio is also very, very small.

There are many root causes for hunger — low wages, unemployment, poverty. These need long-term — and sometimes political — solutions. In the meantime, I want to help make sure my neighbors have enough food to eat and that kids have enough food to eat over the weekends, when they aren’t at school and can’t get lunch there. If you want to help, too, there are lots of volunteer opportunities directly through MANNA, or you can sign on with Hands On Asheville-Buncombe, which offers volunteer opportunities in a wide variety of areas — from working on hunger to the environment. Statewide, the North Carolina Hunger Forum is working to cut hunger in half by 2015. There’s also a Raleigh-based group, Stop Hunger Now, dedicated to stopping hunger internationally, and Feeding America can give you some places to start helping other locations.

There are hundreds of hunger-fighting organizations across the country, so if you’re thinking of donating donate money to these or any other organization, take a little time to do your homework first. Look at nonprofit researchers GuideStar or Charity Navigator and check with a consumer protection agency (like the Better Business Bureau’s Wise Giving Alliance) to make sure you’re informed about what your money will do. Ask around and see what works for you, what your neighbors or colleagues recommend. 

Either way, now is the time to help. Part of my goals for the year include volunteering at least 40 hours. I’ll let you know where and how that works out. But, I’d like to know about you, too. Did Obama’s call to service move you to action? What are you doing and/or planning to do to make your community a better place for everyone?

One of my goals this year is to really start working on my photography. I discovered that I love taking photographs and learning about photography just a few years ago, when I was in grad school and spent all my free time wandering through a textile mill that was shutting down, watching workers slowly cart all the looms and other machinery out the door. Writing about this was one thing. Seeing it was another, I quickly learned. And the first digital camera Pat bought me for Christmas one year — I cried I was so happy — fueled my love of wandering around and taking photographs.

What I’ve also realized, though, is that it helps to make time to practice. I’m one of those people who like to be perfect the first time around. I admit it, freely. But, practice! It struck me today that the idea is almost unheard of — for me, especially — and completely underrated. But there’s a lesson there, obviously. Musicians likely spend more time practicing than performing for others. But practicing writing or reporting, for example? Who encourages that?

The answer is that I’m going to encourage practicing, for myself and my photography at least. Last weekend, you’ll remember, I organized a photog meetup in West Asheville to get some practice in and to meet other photogs interesting in learning. Six of us crowded around a little table at the bakery down the street, passing around Keri Beth’s Gorillapod and talking about photography inspirations before heading out to shoot for about an hour or so. Along with the interesting group of photos everyone shot during the meetup, a cool list of online sites to check out started to emerge. It’s still small, but I think it will grow as the conversation continues and as I keep practicing. Here’s what we shared with one another, places to go for inspiration and information, to help our practice develop:

Reviews, technical info and equipment specs:

• Camera Labs
• Digital Photography Review (also known as DPReview)
• Steve’s Digicams

There’s a tell-me-about-yourself listing thing circulating around the Internets. The idea, if you haven’t been “tagged” to do it yet yourself, is that one person writes a list then “tags” a group of friends and acquaintances to write their own list and share it. Kind of like a virtual way of playing tag, minus the running in circles and skinning your knees in the schoolyard.

Kathryn tagged me over a week ago to put together a list of 16 things about myself. Then on Sunday, Sandy tagged me to do the 25 things about myself list. Woah. These things make me nervous for some reason (probably for some of the reasons I listed below). But I sat down yesterday and wrote it out and, in the end, I thought it was really interesting to cull through my memories and goals and thoughts and dreams to come up with 25 things worth sharing with you all. I left a bunch of things out, and some of these items aren’t even the most important things I’m thinking about or doing right now, but they’re what came to mind.

Here they are for you to read. (Again, for some of you on Facebook, who I tagged to do this, too!) And I’ve discovered that I really love reading other people’s lists, too. So share them, if you haven’t already!

1: I wrote this out last night only to have my computer close my browser for no good reason, thus annihilating all the things I had thought up to share with you all. Moral: I don’t save my work enough.

2: Having to think up things for these lists makes me worry that my life is boring.

3: I’m a private person.

4: Once, when I didn’t know what to do anymore about anything, Kathryn told me to come up with a daily routine and follow it, that sometimes following that routine helps more than anything else can. It’s the only piece of advice ever given to me that I try to follow nearly every day.

5: I love North Carolina, and even though I wish/dream about moving out of my home state, I know I’ll probably never move away or leave it again for long periods of time.

6: I love big cities and daydream about living in Chicago or New York.

7: I love red velvet cake with reckless abandon. Relatedly, I need to go to the gym more.

8: I miss my mom and dad every day. I especially miss my mom’s cooking and endless questions and my dad’s amazing hugs and sense of humor. I think I act more like my dad (sensitive, stubborn) but I look more like my mom.

9: Pat and I are godparents to ALL our nieces and nephews. (Two girls and soon to be three boys.) Pat’s siblings and their spouses joke that they shouldn’t ride in a car together, in case there’s an accident and we end up with a bunch of kids.

10: I’m amazed at and by circumstances — mainly other people’s. I’m starting to believe in fate.

11: I want to be the best writer/journalist and photographer I can be, but I sometimes lack confidence and/or focus (I want to do it ALL, RIGHT NOW) and/or faith.

12: I have a secret, embarrassing fascination with the Bravo shows “The Real Housewives of Orange County” and “The Real Housewives of Atlanta.” Now it’s no secret. (I’m working on an essay about them…)

13: I both take myself too seriously and not seriously enough. I often think I’m doing the wrong one.

14: My first “real” kiss (from a boy who drove a red Mustang, good lord) was under the sycamore in the pasture at my parents’ farm. Standing under that tree, especially in the springtime with Pat, is one of my absolute favorite things to do/places to be in the world.

15: Still, I really love to travel. I love walking around streets that are completely unfamiliar and getting lost. I love the architecture and food and art and talking to people and trying to speak their language. But, planning for a big trip makes me anxious. 

16: I don’t hide my feelings very well, though I try to.

BONUS (Are you still reading?)

17: When I was a kid, I found a baby woodpecker in the churchyard next to our house. I brought it home and my dad helped me find a shoebox to keep it in. We tried to feed it baby worms, but it really liked liquified peanut butter that we pushed into it’s mouth with a needle-less syringe. We kept it for several weeks, then I put it back under the tree where I’d found it. I didn’t stick around to see what happened, but several hours later it was gone.

18: Also, when I was a kid my parents would get a bunch of chicks, which we kept in an incubator and later raised in our backyard and on the farm. Huge black snakes (we called them King Snakes) would crawl through the fencing and eat the chickens. It was really weird. I’ve been thinking about those chickens and that woodpecker a lot lately.

19: I love that I grew up in Davie County (NC). I often miss rural North Carolina.

20: I’m not so in love with Asheville, even though I’ve lived here — for the most part — since 1990. I think I may be the only person in the city limits that feels that way.

21: I love people who have those two concentration/worry lines between their eyebrows. I think they’re cute.

22: Ruby, my grandmother, is turning 100 years old in less than a month! She lives in a nursing home in Burnsville, but only because getting someone to stay with her at her home in Mitchell County was impossible. She is such an amazing woman. 

23: I don’t know where I’d be without Pat.

24: When I was 16, I spent a summer camping from North Carolina to California and back again. I think that trip really changed the way I became an adult, the things I believe and how I am.

25: I’m 50 percent perplexed by and 50 percent amazed by my life. I think a lot about where I’m going, what’s to come.