I love being a Wildcat Youth Mentor. Not only is it rewarding to know I am making a difference in someone else’s life, it’s actually a fun break from my otherwise busy schedule. For a couple hours a week, I hike over to Oyster River Middle School and just hang out. Some mentors play board games, some paint nails, teach sports or color. But not me. No, not me and my mentee. We bake. For me it’s brilliant; I’m a terrible baker. But my mentee loves it. So I sit back and let her take the reigns, and in the end, I get some free cookies. That was, until, the incident.
It was a mentoring day like any other. We had looked up recipes to make mini pies the week before and each agreed to bring in a couple of ingredients. I brought my ingredients (dough, chocolate sauce and some Reese’s to munch on), however my mentee forgot hers. We could roll with what I had brought however. I was inspired by a simple dessert I had once had, which was literally just bread balls that you dipped in chocolate. And we had all the fixings for that!
So, we set out for the Home Ec room drooling over the thought of our soon to be delectable treats. First thing first, melt the chocolate. We unwrapped a couple of Reese’s and stuck them a cup to microwave them. We put them in for a couple of seconds, but they needed more time. We heated them a second time, but they again needed more time. So we popped them in for a whole minute. Great, now we can start making dough balls. I had my back to the microwave for maybe 20 seconds when my mentee says, “Oh, it’s smoking a little.” A little she had said. When I spun around I was faced with a microwave billowing with smoke. Positive that when I ripped the door open I would be faced with flames, I was relieved to just find smoking candy.
I flew the smoky cup over to the open window, hoping that that would take care of most of the smoke. We then grabbed cookie sheets and started fanning the smoke away from the sprinklers. The smoke thinned, and thank goodness the sprinklers didn’t go off. However, those sprinklers should have been the least of our worries. The massive fire alarm should have been our first priority. And guess what, it went off.
Alarms now rang through out the entire school. I was horrified. My mentee looked at me in a panic and instructed me to “grab my stuff and let’s get out of here.” For a brief moment I thought to act on her command but shook my head remembering I am the mentor and must set a decent example. I told her we had to go find some teachers to help us out. Luckily two were already headed our way. We quickly explained nothing was on fire, we had just burnt some chocolate. They laughed and one comforted me with a story from her first months of working there when she accidently burnt some chicken nuggets. Unfortunately the whole school had to evacuate (but fortunately it was after school hours).
If you thought it couldn’t get any worse, you’d be wrong. The fire department decided to show up to the party too. And then the police department tagged along. I officially just lost the award for Mentor of the Year.
Thankfully, we did not burn down the entire school, and I was not featured on the ten o’clock news as ‘the Girl Who Burnt Down ORMS.’ We were just informed that the proper way to melt chocolate, which is to stir on a stove at low temperatures, just in case you were wondering.
If you have any interest in being (a better) Wildcat Mentor you can contact Bruce Montville at bmontville@lifewise-nh.org or (603) 929-0832.