A new gas water heater sits on the floor in the back room, the empty carton it came in sagging listlessly nearby. Two large buckets of joint compound, now containing nothing more than hardening bits of white goop, stand sentry in a corner. Other detritus -- three paint cans, two old rags, a ladder, gloves, a couple of heating-vent registers -- are strewn here and there.
The place, Notre Dame senior Amy Vosburg will tell you, is beautiful. "It's amazing to see the transformation," she says, clearly recalling her first glimpse of the decaying rooms.
The apartment, one of two upstairs over what was once a South Bend grocery store, is in the final stages of renovation. Amy's been in on it from the start, helping to tear down old walls, to frame new ones, to do dry-walling and painting. Swaths of white paint on her sweatshirt and jeans reveal what she's been doing on this chilly Saturday.
When Amy heads outside to rinse paint brushes in the cold-water stream of a green hose, other workers continue last-minute touch-ups of the interior. Throughout the fix-up project, those workers have included the people who will live in one of the two apartments. That's part of the deal; that's the way That's what Amy likes best about her chosen volunteer activity: "You actually work with the people who are going to be living in the house. I wish that all service could be run the same way -- it empowers people to help themselves."
The 21-year-old enjoys the nitty-gritty labor stuff as well. "This summer I got to help with framing," she says. "That was pretty cool."
As can happen in volunteer work, Amy is being stretched in a lot of different ways. While students have worked in the past with the Saint Joseph County Habitat group, the Notre Dame Habitat chapter finally has its own project. Construction of a new house a few blocks from campus started in March. For that project Amy had to work on getting permits and on financing. "I've never done fund-raising before," she says, as a whining saw in the next room sends sawdust drifting through the apartment.
The fund-raising, Amy says, was highly successful -- one anonymous donor even agreed to provide a $10,000 matching donation. And Amy, along with other student Habitat volunteers, worked for food services at Notre Dame during Junior Parents Weekend, then donated her wages to the cause.
Fund-raising and the complex paperwork involved in getting building permits is not high on Amy's list of preferred chores, but the experience is teaching her a lesson about what it takes to get things done. Glinda Nicodemus, executive director of the Saint Joseph County Habitat group, says she had to laugh when, during a meeting, Amy said in an exasperated voice: "I just would like to spend more time building." Nicodemus told her gently, "We all would, but you have to have the money before you can do the building."
Although Amy calls her volunteer work for Habitat "the best part of being at Notre Dame," she's also given time to other projects, from task-force work on the Appalachian Seminar as a junior to a summer service project in Baltimore after her sophomore year.
The Baltimore experience reinforced her conviction that housing is a major social need. She was doing advocacy work for a Baltimore family of four who lived in a low-income project made up of row houses. When a fire broke out in the row house next door to "her" family, firefighters were forced to destroy her family's house to battle the next-door fire. The displaced family had nowhere to go. "They became homeless in one night!" Amy says, shaking her head in disbelief. "What really hit me hard is how easily their lives fell apart."
The other thing that hit her hard was the irony that "the system works against people who want to make their lives better." She cites the example of a heroin addict she worked with who desperately wanted to enter a rehab program. The woman was denied that help because she had no health insurance.
Amy's not unique in her commitment to volunteer activities. "In my group of friends," she says, "almost all of us are involved in some sort of service." And she plans to continue service work after graduation. "I want to do at least a year of volunteer work -- I want to do something religiously oriented."
She's also been giving serious thought to career goals. While her original plan was to do medical research, she's now applying to law schools. With a law degree, she'd like to work for a non-profit organization or in some sort of meaningful social activity.
Her friends have warned her, however, that after law school she might look for a high-end job to pay off her school loans. Says Amy, "I hope I don't end up doing that."
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