It was a long day. I picked up coffee and pastries for the volunteers at 7:00 am. Just before 5:00 pm, I found myself walking away from the schoolyard, wonderfully unburdened. The last of the games had been dismantled, and the pieces stored away, and the 21st Annual Cornell Elementary School Silly Olympics was done.
The forces of entropy worked hard on this one: The event was rained out last Sunday, and rescheduled for today, a Saturday. We needed about 200 volunteer hours today, and many of the parent volunteers couldn’t reschedule. The new coordinator–that’s me–had never even attended a Silly Olympics, and the old coordinator was out of town for the weekend. The documentation for most of the activities was from 2010. We needed about 400 white powdered mini donuts for one of the games, and when we went to pick up the order yesterday, it had come in with donut holes instead of donuts, and this wouldn’t have worked because you can’t string donut holes and hang them from a clothesline.
The school district scheduled a custodian, but when he arrived at 8:00 this morning it wasn’t the regular custodian, and he didn’t know where anything was, let alone where and how it was to be set up.
That last caused my faith to waver. An hour later, more volunteers showed up. I was busy organizing on the fly and answering questions. (My answer to about every third question was: “I have no idea.”)
At 10:00, an hour before the gates opened, I began to see the miracle of order emerging from chaos. The volunteers were working together, finding their own resources, solving their own problems. No one just stopped and waited for help. People shared their knowledge, remembering from past years how the games were arranged and put together.
Preparation paid off, too. During the previous month, we’d had three work parties to fix up and refurbish some of the games. The old coordinator had, as it turned out, warned me about just about everything I needed to be warned about, and had organized and restocked bins of materials needed for the games. The volunteer in charge of the pizzas and hot dogs and drinks and cotton candy was flawless and unflappable.
About 10:45, it got kind of quiet, volunteers aware they had only a few minutes left.
And then the gates opened, and we had a lot of parents and kids walking in and checking out the cupcake walk and lining up to get faces painted, or running straight for the cardboard maze.
And at the Super Splash, when the first kid hit the target with the beanbag, and that swung the beam hard enough that the nail on the other end punched through the water balloon hanging in the basketball hoop, and the balloon broke and the water drenched the other kid sitting in the chair below, and wet kid laughed uproariously, I knew everything was going to work out OK. Before long, even the school principal got in on the action.
