December 16, 2007 By Robert Ericksen
Hispanic Link News Service
(Robert Ericksen, son of Hispanic Link News Service co-founder Héctor Ericksen-Mendoza, is a student ar Reed College in Portland, Oregon. He writes poetry under the pen name L. S. Indio and is preparing as his senior thesis an epic poem on the life of his grandmother, Sebastiana Mendoza, who was raised in a Zapotec village in Oaxaca, Mexico, until she migrated to the United States at age 18.)
PORTLAND, Oregon — For years people have been telling me, "It's all about who you know."
It's usually in the context of business or getting a job, usually for the purpose of succeeding in a company. I have to admit, I always winced a little when I heard them say that, but today, I found truth in it.
Only, I'd add, "It's all about who you know who will jump into a truck with you at five in the morning to ride an hour and a half to a town called Mist to help flood victims and do so with little more knowledge than that."
Courtesy
Left to right: Chalcedony Wilding, Matt Snyder, Brian Moore,
Robert Ericksen.
At about three in the afternoon, I arrived with a truck full of trash at the Neil Kelly Company, where I work part-time, delivering cabinets and doors and cleaning up job sites. I was informed that rather than perform the deliveries and the clean-up I had scheduled for Friday, I would instead be meeting up with a group called Medical Teams International (MTI) and heading to a place called "Mist" to help with post-flood clean-up. By 4:30 I had all the information MTI could give me. I made my run to the dump to get rid of the trash. When I got back, I made some phone calls.
At about six I had my housemate Matt saying he would go with me. At around nine I got my former/occasional housemate Brian to agree to come along with us. We had to meet at the MTI office at 6:30 the next morning. We did so.
Our information at this point was that we would be told on our arrival by somebody in the firehouse what we would be doing for the day.
When we arrived, the three of us were directed to the house of Mike, a 78-year-old man whose front steps had been ripped from his porch. He had to resort to using a three-foot ladder to enter and exit his house.
We got to work. We pulled out his appliances, removed the one-eighth-inch of sludge that covered his entire floor, took out the kitchen cabinets, pulled just about all his furniture and carpets out of the house and piled it all in the yard for the dump truck to retrieve.
While we were there, a representative from the Red Cross showed up and said he was going to declare this a disaster area. I don't know if that was referring to the town or just Mike's house, but it meant Mike would get everything replaced that had been damaged, or at least, that's the story.
We were sorry we couldn't put in more time, but we had to leave at three in the afternoon to get out of there before dark. We met up with the MTI guy and his volunteers and all headed back to Portland.
Brian, Matt and I were all very impressed with just how sharp the man was at 78 and how well he was handling being subjected to a natural disaster. He thanked us for our work and asked if we would be back tomorrow...
As I said, it really is all about who you know - and sometimes, it's also about who you don't know. I know some pretty great people who were willing to put themselves in between an old man and a natural disaster.
I didn't know the old man who showed admirable resilience and good cheer to three strange young men who showed up at his door one cold and sunny Friday morning.
...Tomorrow, we'll do it again. And we'll be one friend stronger.
