AmeriCorps PSO: I’m Not Shipping a Horse to Zimbabwe.

(I know I haven’t finished “Moving to Austin” yet, but I want to tell you about this week while it’s fresh in my mind.)

The title for today’s entry comes from a role-playing exercise we did as part of our Pre-Service Orientation. We were supposed to pretend that we were meeting with a large corporation and begging them for money to fund our VISTA projects. A couple of other participants came to me and my partner to ask us for donations, but were having trouble because we were posing as a shipping company. They asked for in-kind donations such as a discounted shipping rate coupon for a basket at a fundraiser, or possibly some bubble wrap. If you went to a fundraising auction and saw a person bidding high on a large supply of bubble wrap, wouldn’t you think he was probably taking it home to his kinky wife and delivering a *package* to her? Of course you would; therefore, no one would bid on it. However, my partner didn’t mention that, he just refused to offer a discounted shipping rate (we were supposed to play it tough) because he wasn’t going to “ship a horse to Zimbabwe for ten dollars when it would have cost ten thousand.” I completely fell out of character because I couldn’t hold back my hysterical laughter. Don’t get the wrong idea about the PSO, though—this was one of the high points. Most of it was miserable.

We began on a Monday afternoon and didn’t leave until Thursday at 2 p.m., when we were officially sworn in as VISTAs (Volunteers In Service To America). When I think over the week and the endless time I spent in classes, conferences, sessions, group activities, and character-building exercises, I marvel that I made it through without running down the Holiday Inn Tavern and drinking myself into a stupor. There were some participants, however, who did indeed take that route, sometimes with disastrous effects (more on that later). I’m sure at this point, my memories of what went on are exactly like those of any other person in any profession who goes to a conference or a workshop. All you can remember from the experience are words and phrases whose elusive meanings exist only in the world of business and organizations: networking, resource mobilization, sustainability, strategic thinking, action planning, capacity building. Even if my original fear had come true that I would be trapped in the hotel and forced to learn how to sell knives door to door, the PowerPoint presentations they used probably wouldn’t have been much different.

Our facilitator had a special gift for using clichés to explain her point, while slightly screwing up the phrases so they fell strangely on the ear. One example: “Rome wasn’t built by one person.” True enough, I suppose, but I always thought the important part was that it wasn’t built in a day. She also encouraged us to “emerge ourselves in the community.” My guess was she meant “immerse” or some other transitive verb, but I was completely lost when part of her instructions were to “implement the utilization.” Say what? She also had us participate in dozens of inane activities which made little or no sense. My favorite was when we were discussing cultural literacy, and she told us to write down words that we may encounter in our communities and programs that we may not understand. If you missed the point here, let me put it simply: we were being asked to write down words that we didn’t know. We did some networking at our table, collaborating and mobilizing our shared resources, and we concluded that we had no fucking clue what was going on. It was a team effort, though, and I think we can draw on that collaboration for future trips to the Twilight Zone.

As for the people at the PSO, many were just what you’d expect: kind, generous, well-humored, salt-of-the-earth type folks. Some, however, were the kind of people that go into volunteer service because it’s the only type of job where they that can’t easily refuse or fire you. Of these people, my favorite was a 47 year old Vietnamese man named Dat. Dat had an excellent command of the English language, but terrible pronunciation. So not only did he talk constantly in an extremely loud voice about anything and everything that popped into his head to anyone he encountered, but no one could understand him. After only a few hours into the orientation, he developed a reputation for making unwelcome sexual advances to any woman who crossed his path. One night he caught me and a friend leaving the hot tub, and somewhere in his incoherent verbal diarrhea, he tried to bribe us to stay in the hot tub with him by offering us five beers for every half hour we stayed. When that didn’t entice us, he offered me a Turkish back massage if only I would get back in and sit with him for a while. Run away, run away. The next night he came into the hot tub before we could pretend we were leaving, so a few of us just moved right outside to talk on the outdoor patio. Soon Dat joined us wearing nothing but his tighty-whiteys and a towel covering him. For some reason, he felt the need to put his swimsuit in the dryer and walk around the hotel in his underwear. After I went to bed, he (reportedly) got ridiculously drunk at the hotel bar, was cut off by the bartender, and went around the hotel terrorizing people by banging on their doors, trying to grope them, and screaming that he needed more beer. In Conference Land, we call this Stress Management and Alleviation Seeking Hedonism and Environmental Destabilization (S.M.A.S.H.E.D.). At one point during dinner on the second night, I made the mistake of asking Dat to teach me some Vietnamese. He quickly wrote the word “Ma” six times on a napkin with different English translations under each of them. They were all the same word, but the pronunciation was slightly different, and I could not make my voice pick up the subtleties he wanted. I was a terrible student, but perhaps I can teach you. Ma: ghost. Ma (growling): young rice. MAAaaa (high to low): but. MaAAaaAA: tomb. MaAAA: sheet. The nice thing was, no matter how I said Ma, the chances were good that I was saying something a Vietnamese person would understand, even if they heard “ghost” instead of my intended “tomb.”

My roommate for the duration of the orientation was named Saudia (we had another guy named Peru—I kept trying to get the two together). From the moment I stepped into our room until the moment I left, she never stopped talking (perhaps the verbal diarrhea was contagious). I didn’t even really have to be there; she just needed a recording of a human being that randomly says, “Uh-huh. Oh, yeah? Really? Hm. Uh-huh.” She was a hardcore Christian who abbreviated all of her curse words to the first letter, which confused me before I figured out what she was doing. After a few minutes, I even asked her if “bee” was a new slang insult, but she explained that she was just avoiding saying “bitch.” She was also a homophobe, telling me that at her job with Cingular Wireless her office was gay enough to be just like “Sodom and Gomorrah.” I didn’t see her reaction to the part of our session on discrimination that dealt with sexual orientation, but I imagine it wasn’t good. We had a good portion of people just like her—I guess you could call them compassionate conservatives. They found a way to bring the Lord into any discussion, despite the VISTA code that says you can’t proselytize during your official duties. Let’s all thank Bush for including faith-based initiatives in federal funding. Way to go, Dubya.

There were some good times at the PSO, I admit, but I was very ready to come back home to my own bed. I start a week-long training period tomorrow for my specific project, when I’ll find out all about what it means to be a “Marketing Coordinator.” I’m going to stay up late tonight practicing networking so I’ll impress my boss tomorrow.