Doodle

Another strange day on the planet. The "volunteer" thing went fine this afternoon, all the teachers seemed to enjoy their time fiddling with sticks and whatnot. Apparently it is customary to recieve a bit of a payoff for that type of session, so I was given some book tokens. It takes a bit of the volunteerism away.
I remembered I had a different kind of meeting in the evening where I was initially half listening to the conversation and doing a little doodle of one of the chaps there on the itinerary. He is now retired, but leads an active volunteer life in the community. In the end the drawing took on more meaning.
There is a commemorative event each year in the community here as a memorial to those men (basically prisoners of war) who died in the building of the local dam. For the past six years or so I have been involved in the building of a sort of stage decoration for that. It has been hard some years to go along with the harsh rules of the venue where the thing is held. The people who run it seem to be of the opinion that the place would be a lot easier to run if the public wouldn't keep coming in and using it. My fellow colaborator in this stage production let slip a little too much of his frustration at this and upset the chap above by suggesting that the volunteers who come along to help weren't much use. One careless word can have some nasty results. I hope the mood was smoothed out in the end, or rather I hope the chap appologised after I left as I had done my best to smooth out the issue and make it clear that for myself the two attractions of participating are the novelty of the decoration only being up there for a day unlike the work I usually make and that there is some sense of collaboration to produce something. Over the years there has been a sense of the volunteers becoming more involved in the creative process, let's hope that little slip of ettiquette hasn't set us back to zero.
Hey ho.