I’m just a girl who can’t say no to volunteering
- col-teri-stein
- July 26, 2021
- 754
This column almost didn’t get written because, well, I’m just a girl who can’t say no to volunteering. Well, most of the time, everyone has their limits. This past weekend I volunteered as part of a week-long event, three different places for three different organizations, and it was a blast.
You can learn a lot by volunteering, meet new people and help in your community. What could be better than that? It is OK to work for free. People need to keep that in mind because there are so many opportunities for volunteers out there to help others. And isn’t that why we are all here?
One of the things I learned by volunteering was how to drive a golf cart. Luckily, they are easy to drive, but I had never had the opportunity to drive one until we volunteered at a state park campground. The golf carts were essential. We spent many hours driving around the large campground cleaning campsites, putting up tags on the posts for incoming occupants and picking up litter. Socializing with other volunteers and campers was fun too.
Litter is the worst. After a couple weeks of volunteering at the campground, you could not even drive your car to the store without noticing the litter along the roadside and having an uncontrollable urge to stop and pick it up. We also learned to hate cigarette butts; it seems a lot of people use the beach for their own personal ashtray.
We found various things around the campsites from loose change to cell phones. One volunteer even had a theory about how to tell if the economy is good or not. If the economy is good, you will find more loose change on the ground and left on picnic tables, and if it is not, well, you hardly ever find even a penny. We found this to be true too.
Joe had a great time helping out with the park’s youth fishing program every week, and that gave me a chance to have the camper to myself for a couple hours.
In other volunteer activities, we have learned more about the history of our area and met some great people we never would have met otherwise.
There also are some times you learn things you wish you hadn’t.
Last Friday I was volunteering at an event and felt something drop down the back of my neck. I attempted to brush it off and thought I was successful. Then I felt some movement in there but, in my always look at the bright side attitude, brushed it off as sweat dripping because it was hot that day.
My co-volunteer was keeping it quiet that she thought a spider had dropped into the back of my shirt. It was a good thing because my pulse jumps up and my breath increases when I just see a spider in my house; it doesn’t have to be on me. She did encourage me to go to the restroom to see if there was a bug in my shirt.
I went but just flapped the material around, and nothing dropped out.
It’s an hour later, and I was having a great time chatting with the other volunteers and people at the event. I realized I sometimes missed the connection I had with co-workers when I was still on the job, but not enough to unretire.
All of the sudden I felt little legs inside the front of my shirt headed for the neck opening. The panic was immediate. I hurriedly folded the neck material open and out falls a quarter-sized spider. OK, it could have been a nickel-sized spider, but that is not the point. It was a spider!
I felt slightly bad stepping on it because it had been crawling around inside my shirt for an hour and had not bit me, but my job was to pass out bags of stuff at the event to kids. I was not going to take the chance of handing a child a bag with a spider in it.
The whole situation has made me paranoid. I keep feeling like something is crawling on me, but nothing is there.
Despite that one setback, volunteering is still wonderful, and it is nice I have more time to do it. Lately though, it seems volunteers are in short supply. Please consider helping when you can. There are so many opportunities you are sure to find something that interests you. Spread the message.