Schedule

I am part of the residential team, which provides support to guests during nights and evenings and provides daytime driving for guests and support to other teams.

I work two dayshifts each week, driving people to appointments and doing random projects like cleaning up the video room, helping the garden team if they need more hands, organizing games and proposing more games to buy for the community, etc.

I also work three night shifts each week, being mostly at one guest house from 6pm to 9am. That includes talking and listening to guests, playing games and fostering good time use, helping people organize personal and common spaces, helping develop a “living room culture” at the house, helping people develop and use coping skills (in a very limited and careful way, but especially surrounding sleep) , and observing for anything unusual. In many ways during that time I am eyes and ears for the clinical staff. When I’m on at night, I’m one of only three staff who are working (although there are always at least two others who are on call). I can sleep from 10:30p to 6:30a but am always available to guests by knock on my door. Thus, some nights I get great sleep, while other times sleep is limited and/or segmented. This part of my job, especially, is like being paid to be a healing presence (still a bit of an amazing concept to me…).

Two days a week I work at the Monterey General Store. That is nice because it helps me make connections off the farm and in the surrounding community; it’s also a very tangible and immediate and process-based job (a good contrast with my farm job, which is intangible, long-term, and more of an art than a set process). Besides, the money will be nice (they call us volunteers at the farm for fairly good reason).

Hope that helps those of you who were wondering…