Oh dear. I'm sorry to hear about this turn in your life.
In my hometown, these would be two good organizations to volunteer your time at:
I'm sure you can find equivalent organizations near you.
BTW, how many hours are we talking about?
EDIT: If you *must* work on an open source project, my
MPD client can really use a PyQt port of the python-mpd library. This should use PyQt's Qt sockets for asynchronous communication, and emit signals for both return values and errors. Of course, it should do everything else (e.g. parsing the output into Python lists and dictionaries) that the regular python-mpd library does.