A girl in maybe eighth grade came up to me yesterday after the writing club at school. Solid-built girl, uneven braids. “Are you a teacher during the day?” she asked. I told her I wasn’t, but figured I could help her find one. We scanned the room to find the all-day teachers. I asked her why she needed one. “I need to do community service.”

I handed her off to a second grade teacher, who didn’t know what to do with her... some sixth-graders had already come through and cleaned up his classroom. I considered having the girl come over to my workplace. To do what? She couldn’t help the welfare clients or the drug-rehab cases. I figured I could get her to sort the last of the monsoon of clothes donated before Christmas. (The piles of garbage bags had been higher than my head and filled the bottom floor of a large stairwell; now they were ankle-deep, and we’d tired of getting rid of the rest.) And what good would that do to have her sort them? Well, surely if she saw there were that many clothes left unneeded it couldn’t fail to have some effect...

A memory of my first community service assignment came back to me. Standing in an assembly line with my second-grade classmates, we would slap together bologna and cheese and white bread for the homeless at Union Station. Sandwich after bland sandwich; so much mustard. They don’t get vegetables? I wondered at the time.

The material scarcity or sensory overload of inequity does a great deal of educating in and of itself. I remember the stench of the dead room at the Humane Society. I remember the feeble warmth of the pocketed sunflower seeds given to me by a public school child who insisted I do his homework. Trying to pay for what I couldn’t do for him. I remember the streets around the Tijuana orphanage had no sidewalks and dogs that limped.