This diary is just really a paean to the staff and volunteers working out of the Parker office of Douglas County, CO. I volunteered to go there and work for 5 weeks, along with two others from Dallas. Unfortunately, due to family circumstances, I had to get back to Dallas after just one week (my fellow Dallas volunteers are still there!).
I do read about this phenomenon on DKos and elsewhere, but I had it reinforced for me this past week: Obama staff and volunteers seem like the most pleasant and well-adjusted people one can ever meet! Anything I can say about Obama volunteers seems altogether too inadequate and pedestrian.
Follow me over the fold for a bit more on our excellent adventure...
The three of us, Pam, Jon and me, attended Camp Obama, which is the current name for the volunteer training program, on Saturday September 20, in Dallas, along with about 50 others. The people were are all terrific, and so we had a great time learning the ropes and making connections.
The next stage was organizing little groups of like minded (really similarly itineraried!) people to go to CO. Our team leader (who sprung up quite organically) was Pam. She was on the phone constantly with a coordinator in Austin, then with state coordinators in CO and finally tracked down our host and put our little group of three together. We decided we would leave early morning Saturday, Sept. 27. Pam came to my house in Plano and picked me up. We drove down to Jon's house, to leave Pam's car there for the month+ and commandeer the car that Jon's mother kindly loaned him for the trip. Here we are at Jon's house (from left, Pam, Jon and me):
We had a fun and conversation filled drive to Parker, CO. Reached there early evening. Our host Linda was just the most adorable person you can ever meet, here she is with Jon and me:
She has a quaint, cute house in a very scenic setting. Had a separate room for each of us with walkout decks! She was friendly and thrilled about our work for the campaign and we talked pretty late into the night, even though we were to leave early for work the next morning!
The young people running the office are simply superb -- their quiet energy, their even quieter reining in of their own enthusiasm so as to keep the focus on the quotidian tasks that they have to keep on performing until election, their absolute embrace of, and empathy for, new volunteers, their stunning dedication to their work (some of them have been pulling in 18/19 hour days for months now!), their determination to elect Sen. Obama President, and yes, even their disdain for their parents' generation which has "screwed up" (in the words of one sage 23 year old running the show there :)) their world, are all absolutely awe-inspiring to me. At their age, I was oblivious!
The three of us tried to put in at least 12 hours a day, inspired by the young people there and their work ethic! We were mostly doing data entry. But we did some phone banking and generally helped out with events too. We attended Barack's rally, and Michelle's too! At Michelle's rally, we were with the parents of the young girl who introduced her! Michelle remembered her hand-shake with the girl's mother when she went back back-stage and they were thrilled to bits with that! We all watched the veep debate together and that was a riot! One 13-year old girl watching with was amazingly dead-on about patriotism and what it means to be patriotic.
So, I will close this diary with two things: the first a plea, the second a bribe (photographs of the beautiful young people at that office). The plea: if you have any time at all, an hour, a day, a week, volunteer with your nearest Obama office. Kids all over this country are working themselves to exhaustion to get this thing done. (And take some home cooked food with you. I desperately wanted to cook some good food for them, but had to leave precipitously before I could get settled in. The kids, at least at this office, are pretty health conscious and mostly vegetarian, so plan accordingly!)
And now, the photographs:
From left to right: Andy (from CA), Gagan (staff, from NC), Andrew (staff, from NY), Ally (staff, from CA), Courtenay (staff, ??), Radha (me! from Dallas, TX), Jon (from Dallas, TX) and finally Scott (from CA?):
Above, Pam and another volunteer (Shannon) from CA!
Oh, and finally, there are a few more pics at http://utdallas.edu/.... Also, since I could not catch him long enough to snap a picture of Noah, the 23 year old young man in charge of the show, I am just including below a photo of him that Gagan sent us all from the office opening at Elbert (Noah is the left-most ;-) person):
UPDATE: I forgot to mention the most terrific finale to my excellent adventure: I came back by bus to Dallas. One of the drivers (a hispanic guy, I think) of the bus, noticed my 3 Obama buttons and told me as he was collecting my ticket at boarding "your entry fee will be a ticket and one of your Obama buttons"! I laughed it off and boarded the bus. But then I took pity on him as he was getting off the bus at the close of his stint and told him I would give him one, if he promised to wear it always. He promised, did a nice little jig, thanked me profusely and danced away, thoroughly thrilled! (This was a rather portly man :-)