Useful Work

[mallorys_camera]

There is quite a bit I will miss about this area, and one of those things is how incredibly beautiful it is. These swamps do something to my heart.

So yesterday at VITA, I got this kid $1,000 extra dollars as a tax refund by finding an educational credit that no one else picked up. He was eligible for it last year as well so he can come back in and get his 2010 taxes amended and pick up another grand.

His parents are Cambodian. Having just seen The Killing Fields, I naturally put together a complicated scenario in my head of how they got out of Cambodia, their many years in a refugee camp on the Thai border. They were intellectuals, I decided. That means they probably spoke English when they came over but probably didn’t read it well enough to pick up the professions they were trained for – doctor, nurse, my imagination decided – so picked up jobs as food service employees. I flashed briefly on the Serbian gentleman I met while I was working for the census.

In my fantasy, the kid I got the money for goes back to Cambodia, becomes involved in politics there, and somehow manages to improve life for the citizenry. A hundred years in the future they all eat more protein, they’re taller, they live longer, and all because I was able to get this kid a thousand extra dollars on his 2011 tax return!

Thus do the ripples in the stream push time and human betterment forward…

I love doing this VITA stuff. It’s useful work. And I’m really good at it.

Being really good at something useful has been sadly missing from my life these two and a half years past. Feels really, really good to reconnect with that. Corny but true.