The Heart of a Volunteer

What the makes the heart of a volunteer? Dedication, passion and a smile.

A volunteer can be defined by many things – chaperoning your child’s field trip, raising your hand during a business meeting to participate or spending a Saturday cleaning up a stranger’s home after a devastating flood. Ever since I can remember, I have been volunteering – whether it was with my Girl Scout troop, Youth Group or when I was older with my college or church groups. While many say I was raised with volunteerism in my blood – my parents never forced me to volunteer with these said groups – I wanted to do it and choose to live my life helping others. My definition of a volunteer means you have dedication and passion for a cause and you use that passion and dedication to smile your way to a result.

This past Saturday I traveled to West Pittston, Pennsylvania with two other members of Sons of a Carpenter – a non-profit organization serving survivors of natural disasters.  You might recall a pretty rememberable and one of my most popular blog posts I wrote about a month ago about the anniversary of 9/11 and what it should mean to us. This is a follow up to that, I have been following the news of the flood closely before it happened, when it was happening and now as the cleanup and recovery begins for the thousands of residents of Northeastern PA. This was not the only town affected by Tropical Storm Lee – the whole greater Wyoming Valley area was affected and it will have a lifelong impact on the land, residents and economies of these towns.

We helped home owners rip up their kitchen floor, tear out their kitchen cabinets and salvage what we could out of their cabinets and other belongings. This experience and the many others I have encountered during my volunteerism throughout the years are incredibly humbling and it makes me grateful every single day that I am so blessed to have the things I have. You never know when you will wake up and everything you’ve had and cherished in your lifetime will be swept away by the forceful water currents.

Below are some images I took of the house we helped to clean-up:

 

The water was up to the step right below the end of the drywall arch

Water from the Susquehanna River swept the foundation out from underneath this house

Debris pile along the Main Street in West Pittston

Volunteering in the time of a disaster is not for everyone – it is not for those with a light heart. This is a very emotional time for the survivors as most of their belongings are gone and they are without a place to live. I remember the first time we went to Mississippi in December 2010, just 4 months shy of Hurricane Katrina and the devastation was eye opening then. Most of the people I was sharing this experience with were weeping at the sunrise because the damage was even worse in the sunrise than it was at night. When you are volunteering in these circumstances – you need to be strong and be the shoulder to cry on for the survivors because if you fall apart – they will have nothing to have faith in. Their faith, a lot of times, is what gets them through the tiring times and through the compassion of others – their family, friends and strangers.

I encourage everyone to volunteer at least one time in their life and I promise you it will be life altering experience. It will change the way you see Christmas, birthdays and the everyday aspects of life. All it takes is just a day of your life to change someone else’s.