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My first visit there, I got the grand tour, which was lovely of course. It’s a very open building, with white washed walls, and a marble floor. They add walls for the exhibits to make the most of their space. And while they do need the help, and are glad that we come to them to volunteer, generally speaking neither party is getting a lot out of it. Truthfully, we, the TALH students who serve there, are saving them a lot of work hours. I believe they only have seven employees, if there are more I haven’t seen them.  Jake, Emily, Savannah, Emmie, Humna and occasionally Katherine go on Wednesdays. Lauren and I go on Fridays. Originally Lauren, Jake and I were going to work in the library. AMSET and Lamar University were trying to collaborate and code all of their books, so that they could share a communal library. This sounded great, since I love books and art, and am not overly fond of children, which is a common theme among most of the service activities. Rather unfortunately, though, I still have to work with children, at least on Wednesday. I’m not actually working with them, since they’re ten and reasonably self sufficient, but I am in the same room as them, which should count for something. Andy is in charge of volunteers. And so, by his decree, for the first five weeks, I made sugar skulls. This was not fun. This was not exciting. This was a rather tedious job following the basic outlines of making snowballs and sugar cookies all at once. (That sounded fun, but let me emphasize that it was in no way fun, beyond the infantile, ooh-I-got-my-hands-dirty sort of way.) We mixed meringue powder, sugar and water until it was the consistency of biscuit mix, and patted it into skull molds. Then we flipped the molds. 700 times. We made 700 skulls, and I was involved for more than half of them. (Which isn’t to say I did the most. I’m fairly certain Lauren did the most. Like most things, I wasn’t actually good at it, I was just good enough to be able to complain about other people being bad at it. Life story.) After we finished making sugar skulls I missed a week. And then I helped screenprint T-shirts for three weeks. This is also not fun.