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Volunteering: A Not So Scroogy Christmas For those who happened to be on campus one dreary Saturday morning past, the parade of excited youngsters marching through the concourse might have been misinterpreted. Bring Your Illegitimate Children To School Day, perhaps, or a recruiting drive to pull in tuition dollars from increasingly immature students. But for us in the know, these kids were clearly at Laurier for the Not So Scroogy Christmas Party. Event organizers Ginny Robinson and Tessa Heffernan had spent the preceding weeks traveling the wilds of K-W’s public school system, asking principals to recommend children who would benefit from this free program. The selected were generally from low-income families, which was the real point of the event – to provide a Christmas experience with a little something extra for those in need. WLU students were lined up to act as ‘buddies’ who would be paired off with the children for the day’s activities. Resources were thoughtfully donated from WLUSU, President Rosehart and Deans Campbell, McMurray, Carson and Szabo. On the fateful morning, volunteers stood at the underpass, apprehensive, complaining about the ungodly hour, bitching about workloads – typical November student stuff. But as the busses pulled up and the kids poured out, their exuberance washed over us and their nervous anticipation crippled our self-centred agendas. They came with nothing, with little dresses and suit jackets, with notes begging us not to ply them with sugar. And suddenly it was all about them. Walking through the Torque room, they couldn’t understand why we were still in school just, well, because we wanted to be. That changed, however, when we encountered the escalators at the DAWB. The mechanical stairs which ordinarily propelled us apathetically to our classes were suddenly the joyride of the future, a voyage worthy of attempting again and again…and again. I asked my buddy, J, why he liked the escalators so much and it turned out that he had never seen such a marvelous contraption before. And then he ran back down the stairs to ride them again while I held his jacket and tie. We played vigorous games of duck-duck-goose (reindeer-reindeer-Santa). We caked gingerbread men – and the kids – with massive amounts of icing and gumdrops. We constructed postmodern reindeer decorations with four googly-eyes which, as I explained to J, was an intensely subjective scrutiny of holiday stereotype. He was proud of his inadvertent masterpiece and showed it off to others. While the kids were bundled off to Swiss Chalet for lunch, the volunteers collectively related the escapades of their respective buddies. “This must be what a teacher’s lounge is like,” somebody succinctly noted. We were tired but exhilarated. When the little people returned, Santa Claus paid an expected visit and handed out assorted toys donated by Treadway Tires. “That’s not the real Santa,” J observed. “Santa doesn’t wear black socks.” I had to buy him off with vague explanations as to why one of Santa’s helpers would try to impersonate Santa himself. He is a bright kid but still full of innocent wonder. As the children boarded the busses, gifts in tow, we all felt a little bit strange. As event coordinator Ginny Robinson put it: “Everyone’s affected – the older volunteers get something out of it and the younger kids too, so it’s a beneficial event to everyone.” This was certainly true – I saw a girl moved almost to tears by a simple blackboard scribble by her junior buddy: “I like Selena,” wreathed in hearts. As the busses pulled away, driving these children out of our lives and back to whence they came, we couldn’t help but feel that our day of essays and assignments now seemed trivial and meaningless by comparison. And this is why we volunteer, to put life into perspective.
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