Why do people put their hand up to do things for perfect strangers and/or animals, while others can’t get away fast enough? Photo: File.
Why is it that some people devote their life and times to helping others while the rest of us run a mile from magnanimity?
Why don’t they ask for credit when they do something for someone else, just quietly get on with it? Or if they have to accept thanks, only do so for “the team”?
I’ve tried volunteering a few times, usually because someone made me. It usually starts out well. The volunteer manager is nice to you because she/he doesn’t have to pay you and you rarely have to do the crappy jobs, again, because no-one pays you.
One of my volunteer stints was with a charity where people donated stuff they didn’t want and the charity would sell it to people who did. The charity made a profit, the donatees got to get rid of stuff. Nice work if you can get it.
I enjoyed the work at first, you know meeting new people, playing a part in saving the world, one good deed at a time – or so I thought. That was until I went out to dump some rubbish in the skip one day to discover a near-library full of old books someone had donated, plonked right on top.
For the person who dumped them, it may well have been a case of connecting “old stuff” with “rubbish” and not knowing that one of their volunteer colleagues had spent hours researching the books to find out they were worth a small fortune in the right hands – and not at the tip. But it seems the books looked a bit grubby, so they were chucked out.
Issue No.1: Someone had donated the books under the impression that they would be cared for – and raise a decent sum for charity.
Issue No.2: Another volunteer, a very smart volunteer whom I came to know well and respect more, had spent hours going through said books, checking each online, and discovering that many were exceedingly valuable.
For the charity they were donated to, this translated into a roof over lots of heads and more hot dinners than you could poke both a knife and fork at.
But they were old, a little ratty, almost smelly and not one of them had a shiny near-naked man with adjacent fawning female on the front cover, so how could they possibly be worth anything?
No windfall for the charity, just more “waste” to landfill.
This week, I came across another group of volunteers, a very different kind of marsupial.
This band of about 35 regulars are on call, night and day – and any time in between – answering desperate rescue calls about animals in distress. It’s far from pretty work.
What sort of person goes out in the dead of night, voluntarily, to detangle a huge kangaroo from a barbed wire fence, when chances are that the kangaroo acts like it was your fault? The same sort of person who also goes out when the call comes in that an hours-old joey needs extracting from its large, dead mother? A good one.
But that’s just the start. Once the baby is rescued, it has to be fed on the hour most hours, live with you in its pouch and almost on the hour as well, let fly with stinky unmentionables, that, only if you’re lucky, also land in the pouch.
Thinking of volunteering to make the world a better place? I’d start with the wildlife if they’ll have you, we humans still have a lot to learn.
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