#43: Community Service, the Filarmónica and Spreadsheets

One of the missions we fulfill in the Peace Corps is that of community service through secondary projects. “Community Service” implies basically the same concept to most people – hands-on volunteer work to assist others less advantaged than we. This inference, drawn repeatedly, becomes an expectation articulated as an ideal. Nevertheless, any externally based referent creates just another sustaining illusion to enable us to matter, if only to ourselves.

People pay a heavy price for doing this since these illusions often define their futures, deaden their pasts and deflect the presents. Recently, I listened to the Orquesta Filarmónica de Querétaro perform Ernest Bloch’s hypnotizing rhapsody of Solomon and meditated on the life of that savvy sovereign. He understood something from his cradle: more often than not, for me at least, wisdom entails the removal of distractions rather than requires a flash of insight. This gift to me was welcome in face of a recent summons to present on my project in “Community Service” to the new SEMARNAT Aspirantes.

That peremptory notice made the private language of “Community Service” dreadfully relevant to me as a man who is simply not a real hands-on guy, who is downright shy. Few are those who can say that they do not want to perform a “Community Service”. Like any group, there is something of a consensus here in Peace Corps / Querétaro of what Community Service is. Until Bloch’s work snapped me out of my fuzzy guilt, I had felt like I was coming up short in the ‘Corps’.

Yet the persistence of this uneasy feeling of not meeting others' standards begged the question of what exactly the Peace Corps meant to me. Finally, I was no longer asking the wrong question of why I would not conform to a consensus I had not really endorsed. My past lost its currency while the future merely was tomorrow. So now I could think about the right concern: what is “Community Service” for me? A quick inventory of my activities reveals that all of my present work –- four projects, three more than required -- flows through the same small national science center in which I am serving.

Four projects, that is. The three taken on at my own initiative built up gradually after my first by-the-book “Community Service” did not last very long. Next, I had lined up dutifully to work with a business incubator at a local University. That never materialized. And so I began to collaborate with a fellow in my center who wants to learn English but who is tinkering around with a new invention, a patented health care device. The Filarmónica quickly deepened my contemplative mood with the sublime Symphony #2 by Rachmaninov.

That is when the veil of those language games imposed by others’ values silently slipped away. For the first time, I realized my unromantic, hardly heroic, work of preparing financial forecasts and other elements of due-diligence to commercialize that invention actually serves the larger good. True, I would not be teaching grateful children, beaming at a camera while it clicked away. Equally true, however, is that my time and skill is granted, free of charge. Yet the numbers become compelling, at least to me: up to a thousand new jobs to be created across Mexico; up to a hundred thousand lives saved per year etc.

God then muttered in my ear through his long-dead go-between, Sergei Rachmaninov, “Son, let others teach and hammer the nails. Your mission is to enable people to earn the money that buys the books that your Peace Corps compatriots are teaching them so mightily to read. What’s more, you are letting one in seven people in Mexico live long enough to the savour the literature they purchase.”