There was an incredible amount of energy everywhere around Patchwork last week. It came from a fantastic group of eight high school students and three adults who were all visiting us from Rainbow Mennonite Church in Kansas City, KS.
The connections between Patchwork and Rainbow Mennonite? Jesse Graber who is a former Mennonite Voluntary Service worker at Patchwork, and Ruth Harder, his wife, who is a former Evansville MVS associate member and who is now the pastor at Rainbow Mennonite.
The group piled out of vans in time to join Patchwork’s worship service on Sunday, June 2, and they stuck around Patchwork for the following week. They helped out everywhere in our programming and completed some special projects.
They organized boxes of donations. They helped serve food and drinks during Hospitality time. They helped fix the coffee maker. They cleaned, scraped, and repainted the big blue hand that makes up Patchwork’s sign on Washington Avenue. They trimmed away unwanted saplings in the garden. They sang songs in the summer Arts & Smarts Program. They picked kale in the garden. They helped Susan Fowler and our Arts & Smarts participants act out the story of the Rainbow Fish. They painted a Rainbow Mennonite rainbow on Patchwork’s Little Library which has been waiting for a paint job since its creation. They helped refurbish bikes in the bike shop. They changed light bulbs. They dug holes, mixed cement, and reinstalled ceramic totem sculptures in Patchwork’s garden. They gave our Welcome Matt sculpture a “glow up” by adding a bright new coat of enamel paint.
They helped out around Patchwork in so many ways. Additionally, their presence was a joy for all of us Patchwork regulars. They brought new interest and perspectives to our daily routines, giving us a break from the usual and flooding us with extra hands to help out.
We gave them an opportunity to see new ways of doing things. They got to see the ways that Patchwork builds a special kind of community. They observed that at Patchwork it can be difficult to know who is a guest, who is a volunteer, and who is a staff member. They spent plenty of time visiting with everyone around our building. Hopefully they had conversations with people they might never have talked to otherwise. Hopefully they deepened their vision of what someone who is unhoused or an addict or mentally ill looks like. Hopefully they listened to our volunteers and staff explain their philosophy on their roles at Patchwork and the way that this philosophy makes Patchwork different than many other organizations.
By all indications, the youth took full advantage of the learning opportunity. One example came on Tuesday morning. Our bike shop volunteers had finished giving away 21 bikes and a rainy day had set in. Buckets of water were falling from the sky, so everyone congregated indoors to drink coffee and wait for a break in the storm. As a rainy day activity, a group from Rainbow Mennonite pulled out a deck of Uno cards and started playing at a table in Patchwork’s main room.
Soon, a couple of Patchwork guests approached them. The men were a little rough around the edges. If anything, they could have auditioned to be movie extras for a secret back room gambling scene. But instead, they asked the teens, “Hey! Is that Uno? Can we play, too?”
The teens dealt them in, and the unlikely group continued to play for at least another 30 minutes. There were a couple of the typical disagreements about the rules (how to deal with Draw 4’s and the like), but the teens helped the adults work through them. There was some smack talk, but the freshman girl leading the game kept herself from going overboard. As the game wrapped up, the men told the teens, “Thank you so much for coming in today!”
Susan Fowler met the youth group during her storytelling time in the summer Arts & Smarts Program. She also joined me in giving them a sendoff as they prepared to go home on Friday morning. One thing that she sent with each of them was a card with the following saying written on it. It speaks to many reasons to do this kind of exchange and to encourage this kind of learning:
