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DiggField Notes: Washington D.C.
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Takoma Park is a neighborhood in the northwest corner of Washington DC (spelled differently from the city in the State of Washington). My Trinity Wall Street colleagues Michael McGuinnes and Tom Durack went there to produce a video segment about five young adults, a story to which you can link from this page.
These four women and one man, whose life experience spans Thailand, Italy, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Florida, Brooklyn, and St. Louis, work under the auspices of the Episcopal Service Corps.
The interns serve one year, without pay. They commit to work for social justice, deepen their spiritual awareness, develop “servant” leadership skills, and live a sustainable lifestyle - a very ambitious “to do” list! The Abundant Table Farm Project in California, subject of an earlier video in our series Anglican Communion Stories, is another ESC project.
The interns share a house provided by Trinity Episcopal Church in a leafy neighborhood with single homes, lawns, and drive-ways. But the interns “live” in the entire city. Sure, they visit historic sites and, occasionally, when their modest food stipends permit, eat a meal or drink coffee amidst the international diplomatic and academic community.
Every day they’re traveling by train and bus to the non-profit organizations that benefit from their free labor, in neighborhoods that Washington tourists never see. They’re serving high school students, or senior citizens, or people of all ages, languages, and colors who don’t have sufficient food.
I have no idea what Chelsea, Diondra, Toni, Rebecca, and Michael will do when their intern year is over. Right now, they might not know either! But I bet they’re getting a sense of what Janet Aldrich a veteran of the Washington intern program calls her greatest lesson about true necessities: “All I needed was health insurance, a roof over my head, food money, and a bus pass.”
Maybe that’s all any of us need.