More thoughts on volunteerism

My mother was a volunteer for 30 years at the nursing home in my home town. However, over the years she saw many changes--particularly in the amount of contact the volunteers had with the patients. Early in her "career" she carried food trays to the room and tenderly fed some of the patients--some her contemporaries whom she'd known in college or in a young mothers' group. As rules and regulations changed, there was less and less of the satisfying personal contact. Today I chatted a few minutes with a woman working the produce table at a supermarket. She was quick, efficient, attractive, funny, and in a word. . . classy. When she said something about her shift, I asked her where she had worked before. "I'm a recent divorcee," she said, "and I've had to go to work due to my situation--this is my second job, my primary job is with (a home health care agency). She described to me her other job, the one with the benefits, which was helping a woman in an assisted care wing of a nursing home get back and forth to the dining room and attending a few personal needs in her apartment--but no bathing or dressing--a different paid assistant did that. These are jobs that may be "low pay," but they use to be "no pay"--they were volunteer jobs. As I noted in the entry about "outreach" ideas for church groups, there are layers and layers of laws and regulations dealing with health, safety, education, liability, and environment that relegate volunteers to almost "stand aside" status. And then if your group or activity takes government money, you are even further restricted, especially in matters of religion, even if you are representing a church and providing the service because of your religion.

Sometimes I take a bag (I still use plastic) and walk around the grounds and along the street and pick up trash. People throw an awful lot out of car windows, plus some of it blows off trucks. But, gosh, I wonder if I'm putting someone out of work! As far as I know, we're still allowed to do this, although if I were to get hurt or hit by a car (a teen-ager crashed into our condo street entry lamp post the other day and totalled his dad's new car), I suppose I could sue someone for NOT keeping the area clean and inspiring me to do it as a volunteer.