June, 12, 2005 archives

the los angeles times covered, barely, yesterday’s l.a. works day projects. i was part of the largest group, which painted and did some landscaping at hollenbeck middle school in boyle heights.

considering this is the 13th annual l.a. works day, i was disappointed at how unorganized the on-site effort was. i was part of the group doing landscaping, and it was amazingly disorganized. we ended up planting and digging up some of the plants twice, broke a water pipe digging a hole for one tree, hit but did not break another (or maybe the same) water pipe digging another hole for another tree, dug a hole for a tree in the wrong place, and just stood around while the volunteer leaders tried to get their act together. from what i could see of the paint job on the school, it doesn’t appear that they were any more organized.

the problems with the landscaping wouldn’t have been hard to fix — the missing step that would really help is to place all of the potted plants and trees before anyone starts digging holes for them.

but all that aside, we certainly left the school in better shape than it was when our huge crowd descended upon it, and i think that’s a great thing. i hope the landscaping survives.