mentors

I wake in BJ’s house in Long Gully. Her spare room is anything but spare. Two thin beds camp among piles of stuff and the Ikea shelves—still in packs—that will one day house those piles on stuff. The rest of the house is much the same.

BJ protects children on behalf of us all in her job with DHS. She buys her first house late last year and is still figuring out where to put the piles of stuff. I doubt she ever will and that things will continue to live wherever they alight when first brought into the house. Things around the house happen slowly while she’s busy living life.

She produces cereal a box of spicy nut clusters that taste like the box. I bid her farewell and point the Jazz toward Wedderburn. I’m training mentors for a youth mentoring program. Light rain falls as I park outside the community centre occupying the original Wedderburn Primary School. The place is closed but a big brick shithouse round the back is open. Thank you.

I have an hour to set up a stand-alone classroom with high ceilings built around the turn of the previous century and bone up on what I’m presenting. I shift chairs, tables and cobwebs. My friend Barb, the program co-ordinator, arrives and we catch up. She commutes each day from a Canary Island farm near Boort to Charlton.

Six mentors straggle in and Barb outlines the program. I outline the training, then for five hours we interact, brainstorm, discuss, laugh, and relate anecdotes. They’re good people, good country people, all giving their time voluntarily to spend a few hours each fortnight with a kid from the local school. They’re proud of their community’s togetherness. 

Lunch is a pot of tasty creamy pumpkin soup and tasteless sangers cut in triangles.

Their collective wisdom never ceases to delight me. Fine people make up every group of mentors I train. Today’s group contains a 75 year-old ex-farmer, a feisty retired female teacher, a local cricketer in his forties, the maintenance bloke from the school, an attractive woman in her mid-forties and a switched-on young worker from a community health service in a neighbouring town.

I drive back to Melbourne happy with my day’s work. I’ve facilitated (horrible word) great discussion, positively reframed things they said that didn’t quite hit the mark, and made sure everyone laughs and learns.

Finally at seven o’clock five days of perpetual motion come to an end when I step out of the car and the JRT walks out of the dark to greet me.

    

Rock on.