Volunteering

 I have never been one for volunteering. This is probably based off of my one horrific experience doing mandatory volunteer work in a senior living home where a lady yelled at me for not picking up an imaginary object she had dropped on the floor. I never went back and the volunteer coordinator signed my and my friend's forms because she felt bad. True story.

My friend Katie, however, is avidly involved in volunteerism and persuaded me to come with her on a volunteering adventure in our town.

We volunteered with the Prison Book Program, which operates in a fairly historically significant church in Quincy: United First Parish Church. For those of you not familiar with the area, This is the church that both John Adams and John Quincy Adams attended. They are both interred at the church, which is a national historical landmark. Below is a picture of said church. But I digress....

I arrived early, which I feel the need to note in this blog because I am NEVER on time for things, let alone early ;) Once Katie and I had met up, we headed in through the basement entrance of the church. I was expecting a few lockers full of books and a scale, but this operation was actually fairly sizable with roughly 20 people by the time things were in full swing.

The organization sends books to prisoners in 48 states. They are unable to service California and Texas because the prisons are just too big for the small operation to handle. After we sorted a shopping bag full of mail to weed out those states, we were taken to the book room to "pick".

I did not have the forethought to take a photo of the book room, so here is a photo that I have borrowed from the internet :) The book room is the size of a large closet and smells like a library (which i love!). It's 95% wall-to-wall books with a scale and computer tucked away in the corner. We were instructed to take letters from a certain place on the shelf, read the requests, check the prison's restrictions (i.e. "3 book maximum", "no violence", etc) and then fill the orders as best we could.

The requests...and the restrictions ran the gambit. Most prisoners request dictionaries to help with their vocabulary. In fact, I learned that it is the most common request and one that the program has trouble keeping up the supply for. Some requests were incredibly specific with some prisoners even going as far as to put ISBN numbers. I personally had two highlights:

• One man wrote how much he loved Stephen King and would do anything to read one of his books. Being a Stephen King fangirl myself, I spent about 10 minutes on that one letter trying to find a Stephen King book. I found one tucked away in the corner and shipped it off to him

• One inmate wrote a four page letter requesting a specific Spanish verb book. They wrote how that they would be joining the workforce in the next few year after getting out and know how important it is to be bi-lingual so they were teaching themselves in prison.  They even wrote examples of how it would help them in everyday society. Unfortunately, the spanish dictionaries were in even shorter supply. So I was a little crestfallen not to be able to help someone trying to better themselves. I put the letter in a "dictionary requested" box. 
•  Five minutes passed before the volunteer organizer coincidentally found the exact verb book that the prisoner had requested (it had been return to sender)! I grabbed the letter out of the pile and triumphantly placed it in the bin to be packed.

After around 90 minutes, I was starving and a little claustrophobic (there were up to 10 people picking at one point in the closet sized room) so we left.

I will definitely be going back again! :)