David Stuart MacLean

THE EIGHTH WONDER OF THE WORLD

EVEN THOUGH IT WAS OCTOBER, the idea of walking back to my car made me sweat. I was in Houston and semi-used to a ninety-degree autumn. But after Katrina moved through, the humidity was bonkers. Combine the heat and the humidity with the Dutch oven of a treeless blacktop parking lot and a half-mile trek each way—I was less than inclined to make the trip. But the volunteer coordinators needed people with laptops and I’d left mine in the car, where it would have melted anyway. I also needed to get out of there and into some fresh air for a bit.

The companies that had donated food for the refugees were Krispy Kreme, Chick-fil-A, and Coca-Cola. There were stacks of boxes of donuts and piles of bags of Chick-fil-A (sandwiches and fries) in three of the four corners of the volunteer orientation room. And there were cooler barrels placed every hundred yards or so filled with Coke products. The ice long since melted.

I was raised Methodist. But guitar-playing-pastor Methodist. We were more focused on how Christ behaved while he lived than how he died. Sunday school was all about doing skits based on the Good Samaritan parable. By the time I was in junior high school, I’d graduated from helping out in soup kitchens to spending long weekends doing Habitat for Humanity building projects. When I was in high school, these developed into full weeklong volunteering trips, called work camps, with my youth group doing extensive building projects for disadvantaged communities. The woman who ran the youth group, Syd, was a force of nature and shepherded scores of youths in our small town in Ohio into a more compassionate adulthood through empathy and hard work. I’ve reshingled roofs, replaced porches, shored up foundations, screwed in drywall, and performed some medium-level plumbing tasks (replacing toilets, digging out sewer lines). I chose the college I went to because it had a service-learning component. I spent the summers of college and years afterward as a counselor for those same work camps. And while I’ve left the Methodist church, service has been deeply encoded in my DNA. So it wasn’t too much of a surprise that when Hurricane Katrina hit nearby New Orleans, I ended up at the Astrodome eager to help out any way I could.

The Astrodome stank. Thousands of green army cots were set up in rows around which people set up camp, set up radios, set up tents and privacy walls made of blankets and coatracks. Refugees displaced by Katrina. People stuffed full of chicken sandwiches and donuts and lukewarm Sprite, as well as scared and exhausted and living out of suitcases. It was a deep funk you could feel in your throat.

✦

It was my anniversary month. Three years earlier, due to a prescription drug, I’d had a psychotic break, the aftermath of which I was still working through. Two years earlier, due to the aforementioned aftermath, I’d tried to commit suicide. And a week in the future my fiancée would leave me, breaking off our engagement with a phone call and an email, never to be heard from again. She honestly told me that she loved me too much to marry me. Honestly, Octobers could go fuck themselves.

✦

Six months earlier I’d been in Sri Lanka trying to aid in the rebuilding after the tsunami there, watching a government enrich itself while its people suffered. I’d gone there with my fiancée. We showed up to work with one organization, found out they were a scam, and then broke off from them and worked building a sixty-two-building temporary housing project. It was the most improvised building site I’d ever been on. We had one circular saw powered by a wire that was thrown over the main power lines every morning. We had few tape measures so we nailed the boards up and cut the overhang off, having to stand on a shaky stool with the power saw extended above our heads for the board near the roof. The project was funded by a Green Bay Packers offensive lineman, who at thirty-two had won a Super Bowl but was retired due to injuries to his knees. Finding his way in the world post-NFL, he saw the tsunami hit and got on a plane immediately. In a country where at 5'9" I was frequently the tallest in the room, the Super Bowl champ was staggeringly massive.

We worked with the families who were going to live in the houses. From my coworkers I learned how to catcall women in Sinhala. Oyā ada harima lassanayi naṁgi. You are looking beautiful today, little sister. It was hot work and I rarely wore a shirt. Sawdust clung to me and competed with the sand to nestle into every crevice on my body. We were building about 150 yards from the ocean. The same ocean that had destroyed the homes and schools and roads only two months before. We used the rubble as the basis of the foundations for the temporary houses, then poured cement over the rubble, making something smooth and solid out of what was destroyed.

The Super Bowl champ pulled some side deals to keep us in lumber, bribing who needed to be bribed. They were long, twelve-inch-wide boards that were only at most half an inch thick, but they worked. We put them on the houses like roofing shingles, layering them just a bit to keep the rain out. The guy who supplied us always wore his motorcycle helmet when he visited the site. Even having tea he left his helmet on. We chalked it up to the guy being intimidated by a giant Black American athlete.

In Houston, I had to get out of my apartment. I’d spent too many nights holed up and watching the news and smoking on my little porch and I was regretting even the eight-month lease I’d signed three weeks earlier for this steal of an apartment at the crossroads of the meth and prostitution trades. It was behind a squalid leather bar called Ripcord, whose bartenders wore neon boy shorts and whose patrons wore chaps and were constantly parking in my spot. It was 950 square feet and $375 a month. It was what I could afford. One night or early morning I overheard men talking under my bathroom window, with one explaining, “You don’t rob in this neighborhood. We rob here.” So when volunteering opportunities opened up at the Astrodome, I couldn’t have been held back.

My mental health at the time was unsteady; I was clinging to shallow roles: I was a writer. I was a fiancé. I was a teacher. I was broke. I was a helper. And it was a combination of these roles that led me to volunteer at the Astrodome. It got me out of the house, made me feel less useless, and distracted me from my own mental tumult.

✦

In Sri Lanka, next to our building site was a small house that was the home of some Buddhist monks. The monks were young, teenagers, and they had a computer someone had donated to them. The computer was behaving strangely, running slow, could I take a look at it. I came over and took my shoes off at the door. The computer was a Dell tower with a fifteen-inch monitor. They had a pair of speakers I hooked my iPod to and played some monk-appropriate music, which I thought was Vivaldi. The monks grabbed my iPod and scrolled through my music, blasting Tupac when they found him. I tried running basic utilities on the computer, troubleshooting stuff, defragging the hard drive. But the computer was glacially slow. It didn’t make any sense. I reached behind the computer to check the connections. To be fair, one of the monks tried to stop me. But I was oblivious. I figured I’d waggle the connections and snap the computer out of its torpor. As soon as I touched the metal mesh of the back of the computer, all 230 volts went through my arm to my bare feet. My muscles seized and my jaw clamped down. The monks laughed. I was dazed. The monks had done what we did every morning, which was to throw a wire over the power lines, but there was no ground, except for when I was briefly the grounding line. So the full force of the amperage was flowing through the computer, basically melting its motherboard. I put my shoes back on and went home for the day.

*

The Astrodome when it was constructed was touted as the eighth wonder of the world. You know, the Taj Mahal, the Colosseum, Machu Picchu, and that baseball stadium in Texas. My mom, when she worked for Procter & Gamble in the sixties, a job that required her to wear white gloves up to her elbows, went to a game there when it was brand new.

I was working in paging. There was a registration system set up. If a person came up to ask to page someone, we’d look the person up and pass the information to the announcing booth. But the Astrodome was full of volunteers and refugees and families trying to find their people. It was loud and the speakers crackled with age (all those years blasting shitty rock music didn’t help their precision) and they just kept up a steady burble of name-like distortion.

✦

Once the homes were finally built in Sri Lanka, we had a blessing ceremony. A piece of yarn was passed from hand to hand until we were all connected by the strand. A monk said some things in Sinhala. He gestured to me and the Super Bowl champ and my fiancée at one point, and everyone clapped. There was music, and my fiancée and I danced. There was food, and it was all beautiful. Even the kid who had been kind of a jerk on the worksite was smiling and good-natured. It was a day that was profoundly good for my soul. The temporary houses were done, and families could start to move into them. There were rumors that the houses wouldn’t be as temporary as we’d thought, but they were built well and they’d keep their inhabitants dry. It was the kind of day that makes all the hassles of volunteering worth it.

✦

Word got out around the Astrodome that we had computers that could search for people. And that actually became our job, searching for people. There were three or four emergent databases of refugees set up by people like me across the Gulf Coast region. They were incomplete and clumsy and reeked of government bureaucracy. And after Katrina who trusted the government? These people were fleeing a storm where the government had bobbled the evacuation and recovery efforts. So fuck the government.

✦

The Super Bowl champ left a week after the project was done. He left me some money to disburse to a restaurant that was rebuilding. During the weeks we were building we had eaten at the restaurant every day and become friendly with the owners. He wanted to dole out the money gradually rather than dump a lump sum on the guy, so he wanted me to supervise that the rebuilding was actually taking place and give the money accordingly.

I was staying in Sri Lanka for another month. My fiancée got a job with the Red Cross on the east coast of the country, so I was helping her move out there and then I needed to go back home to Ohio to volunteer with the youth group I’d participated in when I was a kid. Syd, the director of the group, was retiring, and I wanted to be a counselor for her last work camp. That’s where I was in my life: I had to leave volunteering to go volunteer somewhere else.

I was broke, having sunk all of my money into this trip to Sri Lanka. Some family members sent us donations that helped keep us fed (thanks, Uncle Bill!) but for the most part my fiancée and I funded the trip out of my savings. I was a PhD student at the University of Houston. It was my first year. The tsunami happened at the end of my first semester, and I realized that I was thirty years old and still turning in papers for grades. I felt old and maybe a bit like I was squandering my life. So I took a leave of absence, and whatever possessions I didn’t sell, I put in a small storage shed. My fiancée hated Houston and welcomed the detour. She quit her job as the receptionist for the law school, and we packed only the necessities and left early in February. It was romantic as hell.

The east coast of the country was hit hardest by the tsunami, so she had her work cut out for her. I saw her established in her office, and then we traveled to the center of the country for her orientation. It was there that I said goodbye to her. I swung back down south to deliver the rest of the money to the restaurant owner and his wife.

We met outside. I was asked if I wanted tea. Never one to pass up tea, I agreed. He and I passed some pleasantries about the weather. It’s hard to describe how beautiful someone’s backyard could be in Sri Lanka. Lush and embarrassingly green. The restaurant owner showed me the progress that had been made and showed the designs for the rest of the work. His wife came out with the tea on a tray. She was limping. I asked if she was all right.

“Oh, a small accident.”

“What happened?”

“The building men were making the…” He drew something in the air. “It hangs off of the front of the building, protects from the sun? අවන්.”

“The awning?” I ventured.

“Yes. The awning. The men, they left some metal out. Very sharp. My wife was very foolish. She went out walking with no shoes on. She stepped on the metal.” He slapped his hands together. “She lost three toes.”

Something happened in my chest when I heard this. Like a rusty clunk, causing a spring to tighten and tighten in my chest, making it hard to breathe. She survived the tsunami and lost toes during the rebuilding process. It felt like my fault. And even though I’ve been through hours and hours of therapy, it still feels like my fault. My meeting with the man ended soon after. I gave him half of the rest of the money, pushed it at him really, and left. I wanted the money, which wasn’t mine, to absolve me of something that wasn’t my fault. What I knew was that if I hadn’t been there, she would still have her toes.

I was shaken. But my day wasn’t over. I was making my way to Colombo, and since it was on my way I wanted to stop by the temporary houses to see how everything was going. After seeing the restaurant owner I needed some grounding.

I took a rickshaw to the building site, spending money I was quickly running out of. I got dropped off at the road and started walking the two hundred yards to the development. I didn’t get very far before I noticed something was wrong. The boards had warped. They were peeling off the structures. And the roof-shingle method we used only made things worse, causing the boards that didn’t warp to loosen when the boards under them did. The lumber we used was too thin, too freshly cut, and in the hot, humid conditions of beachside housing, they curled up, creating impromptu windows in the structures.

I turned around, not wanting to go any farther. I made it to the main road and flagged down a bus to Colombo. I left the country unsure if I had made even a slight improvement with all of my efforts or if everything was lost toes and warped boards. Back in the States, I was treated like a hero. The youth group I came back to volunteer with treated me like the embodiment of what they worked to create in their kids. I’ve never felt so much like a fraud.

✦

A woman came up to me at the card table I used as a desk at the Astrodome. She was tall and Black and in this sleeveless bedazzled denim jumpsuit. She had long fingernails which had been recently done. I complimented her on them.

“What else are we gonna do?” she said flatly. Her hair was perfectly done as well.

She asked me to search for her son. He’d evacuated with one his aunts. I plugged the boy’s name into the database. Then I plugged it into several of the other databases. The registration process was such a mess.

I turned to the woman and said, “I’m sorry. I can’t find him.”

And this perfectly put-together woman fell apart. She grabbed my arm and crumpled to the ground. She wept and wailed. My arm was getting scratched up and bruised. She held tight onto me. I sank down to the ground and tried to explain that my not finding him just meant he wasn’t registered, that the registration system was incomplete. I asked her if she was registered. She stood up. Wiped her eyes. And walked away.

I don’t know what I expect from doing volunteer work. If I want hugs and T-shirts and comped meals and thanks and prayers and all of the things I have gotten over the years. Or if I want the simple assurance that things are better because I’d been there. That me broaching the well of my own loneliness and selfishness and narcissism and leaving my house to help someone else means that I’ve helped someone else. Maybe that’s too much to ask. And it’s a part of my own selfishness that I demand such a return on my act of giving. In my PhD program I taught two sections of First-Year Writing and Rhetoric. An easy topic for conversation in those classes is always whether or not altruism is possible. It’s always nice to talk to eighteen-year-olds about things. They have intense opinions and limited experience. But after years of having these conversations, it seems that eighteen-year-olds would have you believe that altruism isn’t possible, that the giver is always getting something out of the gift, whether it’s something tangible, the recognition, or the self-regard.

I think what happened is that I made too grand of a gesture with my volunteering and I expected the gesture to be balanced out by something: some massive influx of self-regard or job opportunities or big-time recognition. All the stuff I sold and the life I put on hold, I wanted that to be recognized by the universe and compensated for it in some way. And that is the very definition of selfishness. And I am ashamed to admit it.

✦

In Houston, refugees were given cash cards with something like $250 on them. The news reports of that day were all about how merchants at jewelry stores were incensed that refugees used those cards to buy rings and bracelets at their stores. There was general outrage that the refugees were wasting money that was given to them. I remember feeling strongly to the contrary. You can’t dictate how someone uses a gift. You don’t know what will make that person feel better. Two hundred fifty isn’t going to get you first and last month’s rent on an apartment. So it’s useless to imagine that that money is anything but a paltry drop in a vast desert of inequality and suffering. And maybe I’m talking myself into something here. Because maybe I never should’ve expected that things should get better with myself there. I came and gave my gifts freely. They’re not especially sophisticated gifts. Can’t tell untreated lumber from treated lumber, can’t tell when a computer is a literal hotbox of electricity, can’t figure out how to say that someone’s child not being registered doesn’t mean that he’s dead. Hell, I thought monks would want to listen to Vivaldi more than Tupac. But the fact that I’m there trying means something. It means that the people in those situations aren’t alone. There’s so much ignorance and arrogance and good intentions in volunteer work. And even if your aim is altruism, it doesn’t shield you from negative consequences. You’re not guaranteed a hug and a T-shirt, not guaranteed that your work will mean anything; the skills you have will seem laughable in the face of real suffering. Maybe all that is required is your presence, letting people know they’re not forgotten. 2005 was the year of two celebrity telethons. One for the tsunami and one for Katrina. You’d call in and maybe get Robert De Niro, who’d take your donation from you. Maybe it would have been better for everyone concerned if I would’ve just sent all the money I spent on international tickets and hotels to one of the telethons and been done with it. Maybe I could’ve talked with Tom Hanks.

That’d be a story to tell. The time I talked to Tom Hanks. It’d be better than the stories I have to tell of people losing their toes, lumber warping, and women with immaculate nails crying. 

My attempts at service nowadays are more modest. I help garden with my kids at my mother-in-law’s service project on the South Side of Chicago. I assist my wife as she volunteers across the city, which means I stay with the kids while she goes out to make someone’s life better. I can be backup staff for her. For now. There is a real immaturity in the way that I saw service before. I wanted it to fill some hole in me. I wasn’t actually giving shit. I was taking. And I was upset with the small rewards I was given. I think, in spite of all my eighteen-year-olds’ collective wisdom, I still really believe in altruism. I believe it’s possible to give of yourself and expect nothing in return. It’s been the theme of my most unhealthy relationships.

DAVID STUART MACLEAN is the author of the memoir The Answer to the Riddle is Me (Houghton Mifflin, 2014) and the novel How I Learned to Hate in Ohio (Abrams, 2021). He co-founded the long-running Poison Pen Reading Series in Houston, Texas. He lives and teaches in Chicago.