“When I landed in Florida to work after the hurricane, I got a call from the lead manager,” said the young man, age 19. “We need you to be a supervisor for a volunteer unit of 90 people.”
His “regular” job was in Boston’s Red Cross agency, helping with their blood bank. He was coming to Florida from Houston where he had spent the last several days as a Red Cross volunteer for that flooded city. Before getting back to Boston, he spent days in Puerto Rico.
These were not his first disasters. Volunteering to deploy to the aftermath of hurricanes and floods had become a habit.
NPR caught up with him. That’s how I heard the story. He would like to be able to go to college but he doesn’t have the money yet. So he works the blood bank job to save up tuition money and goes out to trouble spots when needed.
“The hardest part,” he said, “is being with the people who have just lost everything. About all you can do is to be there to listen.”
Our newspaper profiled a man, now in his 80s, who decided a couple of decades ago to look after the needs and lives of veterans of the Korean War. He described them as veterans of the “forgotten war.” He doesn’t make any money but he makes lots new friends.
A few years ago, our Rotary Club began a relationship with Women in Need, an organization that operates houses open to women just leaving incarceration, offering a way for these women to ease back into life on the outside. Judy and a few other club members collect bottles of toiletries, toothpaste, and toothbrushes to put into bags that are given to each woman as she enters one of the residences.
A while back, Judy organized a workday for club members at one of the houses to clear space for planting a succulent garden to spruce up the front of the place. Since then, the women residents have done a good job of tending to the plants. Sometime this spring, the club will clear another space to plant, perhaps with vegetables. A couple of the women at the residence have referred to Judy as “the garden lady.”
At Christmas, Judy and her colleagues made Christmas bags for all 30 of the residents. She reminded me the day we delivered the bags that one of the staff members of WIN had told Judy that residents have said “I can’t believe that these people who don’t know us would do something nice for us like this.”
In Spring 2017, the Senior Class at Island Pacific Academy put on a real “senior” prom. They worked with the staff at the retirement community a few blocks from the school to stage a prom for the men and women who live there.
We met one of the administrators of the community sometime later. He described how delighted the women were to dress up for the prom and dance with the young men from IPA. The gents liked the dancing part as well, partnering with fellow residents as well as the young women from IPA.
The administrator also noted that he was there as a participant. He had moved to Kapolei from Boston a few years back and had divested himself of most of his Boston clothes.
“I kept my tux, though,” he said with a smile. He acknowledged that using it for a senior prom was not in his thinking when he decided to hold on to it. Here he was, at a senior prom with people older than he, put on IPA seniors younger than he.
These are some of the same kids who collected over 30,000 pounds of food for the Hawaii Food Bank in the course of their four years at IPA.
People of a Certain Age, I offer you concrete examples of the habit of helping, people helping whenever they can. Of course, it is no coincidence that “The Habit of Helping,” and “Whenever You Can Help” were phrases the kids at two schools with which we were quoted often. Sometimes, kids referred to these as the school motto. More important was their eagerness to embody the saying in their actions.
The age range for the people I have outlined above is from 4 to 80. The levels of education range from pre-school to Ph.D. Many religions, many cultural and ethnic backgrounds, widely variable life experiences are all represented in this small sample of people. There is no application or previous qualification required to be one who helps.
For any of us who think that one generation has a corner on generosity of spirit or that a younger generation is “all about me,” that assumption might be wrong.
A friend told me about a TV show detailing an experiment with a band of monkeys from a region that did not freeze over in the Ice Age. So there was plenty. Contrary to the action of another band of monkeys from where survival had been a challenge, the experimental group, when given the chance, did not grab a banana to eat without sharing, but broke up bananas and offered pieces to others.
The 19 year old from Boston would understand the impulse.
Daniel E. White
February 19, 2018