Vermont Bar Journal, Vol. 40, No. 2 Vermont Bar Journal, Winter 2017, Vol. 43, No. 4 | Page 12

Happiness
part of spring break-- cleaning bathrooms!
JS: It’s unbelievable how much fun we
had working, cooking, cleaning and just
playing.
JEB: And they kept going back, right.
JS: You got to know kids when you are
learning how to make chili for forty people,
you know.
JEB: So the kids grew and changed be-
fore your eyes?
JS: Yes! That was neat to see. To see the
change in the kids. A lot of times we would
have time at the end of the week where we
would sit down in a circle and really talk
about what it was like. ‘How did this impact
you, being there this week?’ One of the
themes that would come up is that these
kids had always associated affluence with
happiness. You have to have money, you
have to have power and you have to have
things to make you happy. But every fol-
low up came with the realization that these
people we interacted with seemed so hap-
py. That these people were so happy in
their lives but they had so little, they started
questioning their assumptions about life.
JEB: In a good way.
JS: Little things would happen that would
support them. We’d be working sometimes
on the outside of a church, and there would
be people going by waving and cheering.
There was this Fed Ext truck that would go
by the site every day and this guy he would
yell out and say hi to them. All these little
connections and at the end of the week,
you could see these kids change and their
minds open up about looking at the world
a different way. Seeing so much good in so
many people.
JEB: And feeling good about giving. So,
you did it for a few years when Todd was in
high school and he was having this growing
experience and was it your work that took
you out of it for a few years?
JS: I did it with Todd for three years
and then he was a high school senior we
thought we should let him go by himself.
He’s got good skills, he knows what he’s do-
ing. He can take care of himself. Let him go
by himself.
JEB: So his dad isn’t there.
JS: Yes, so I took that year off. And then
after he graduated, there was a little bit less
of a need. So, I took a couple of years off,
12
but I really missed it.
JEB: So most of the adults who went had
a child who was in school?
JS: Some did and some didn’t. It was sort
of a mixture. And a lot of them if they start-
ed going because they had a kid then they
would get addicted like I did. And then sev-
eral years later in 2010, I thought about
how much I really missed this. So, this time
I went for me, which was a whole new thing
because I didn’t have one eye on what was
going on with Todd. Over those three years
I would start to take larger roles with the
other adults and thinking through every-
thing logistically in terms of what we could
accomplish.
JEB: And taking more of a planning role.
Now, did everybody do a piece of fundrais-
ing or how did you come up with the money
for all the supplies.
JS: What would happen is usually for sev-
eral months before this, like the winter sea-
son before this, the kids at the churches
would do fundraising.
JEB: Bake sales or whatever.
JS: And then there would usually be a
cost that each volunteer would have to ab-
sorb to make up the difference so the more
fundraising the less you have to pitch in.
But it was really pretty economically sound.
We would buy all the food we needed.
JEB: You didn’t go out to eat? Didn’t stay
in a hotel?
JS: Nope, usually the church where we
stayed would have a nice industrial kitch-
en and we would break up into groups and
there would be one adult volunteer with a
crew of kids anywhere from three to five
kids and we’d have the breakfast cooking
crew, the breakfast cleanup crew, the din-
ner cooking crew, the dinner cleanup crew.
The clean the bathroom crew, the clean the
living area crew....
JEB: That does not sound like a very fun
THE VERMONT BAR JOURNAL • WINTER 2017
JEB: That’s a skill they were learning too,
like how to cook.
JS: Right, sometimes you are cutting
2x4’s, sometimes you are cutting onions,
but you get to know these kids in a whole
other way. And that was great! There is still
a part of me that is like ready to pack up my
bags at a moment’s notice and do it again,
but it takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of lo-
gistics to figure it out. The bus is no longer
available, which is a huge part of it…travel-
ing together and using it to cart around ma-
terials. It is also a major challenge finding
suitable building projects where a church
will allow a busload of volunteers and high
school students with power tools into their
church!
JEB: Without a bus, it wouldn’t be as
many kids, I’m sure, or as much of a bond-
ing experience.
JS: It wouldn’t be as many kids, but I
think it could still be enormously valuable.
JEB: Somebody has to have a bus, right?
JS: I don’t know. If any VBA journal read-
ers out there...
JEB: Who want to get involved and hap-
pen to have a bus...
JS: Yes, or any groups out there that are
interested. I think if you got a coalition of a
group of churches or may even non-church
youth groups that wanted to put something
like this together. I know some people who
have a lot of skill and knowledge about how
it’s done.
JEB: And who’ve had done it six times or
so.
JS: Right, and I think Mary has done it
probably about 14 times so she really is
an amazing Pastor and she also has some
amazing carpentry skills!
JEB: So that’s another thing I was going
to ask, did you have any carpentry skills be-
fore 2000.
JS: Yeah, I mean I’ve been working on do-
ing carpentry-type stuff since I was a kid.
JEB: So does your son have mad carpen-
try skills now? Does he use them?
JS: He’s actually a project manager for an
engineering/construction company.
JEB: Probably because of this.
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