The Gift of Volunteering

I earned a badge last week when I bared my arm and took the second coVid shot. 

That's me during my timed wait and see period when a volunteer ushered me to a socially distanced chair after the shot was administered and set a kitchen timer for fifteen minutes. While I waited I watched the flow of humanity coming and going like clockwork, and it was clockwork! After weeks of daily shots, these workers had the immunization process down to a science. 

The week before and a few miles away, I had gone to the county health department with my ninety-four year old aunt for her second shot. Same story. Efficiency plus. Caring.  I talked with a few of the workers about why they were there. The majority were on loan from their usual medical practice associated with the particular systems administering the clinics.

And then there were the unpaid volunteers. 

They didn't have to be there, and for that fact, neither did I. I could have passed, but I felt like I was doing my part to end this horrid plague. The volunteer workers did, too. I told the young twenty-something nursing student who volunteered and worked with my aunt, that fifty years from now, she would still remember the details about her time volunteering during the pandemic.

I know that for a fact because she was me, many years ago. I grew up during the tail end of the polio epidemic when mothers put their children to bed at night, fearful that the loves of their lives would not wake up the next morning. We even learned the "Now I lay me down to sleep" prayer. "If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take." I can't even imagine. Neither could my mother because she prayed with me instead of die before I wake, "Guard me through the night and wake me with the morning light."

By the time I was in fifth grade, the Salk vaccine had been invented and life as we knew it was being restored. I joined a Girl Scout Troop and one of the badges I earned was for volunteering at a Salk vaccine clinic. There I was at the elementary school library, holding trays of sugar cubes dotted with the precious antidote serum. My memory tells me purple dots on the white cubes. Maybe, maybe not. But my memory hasn't dimmed the lines of children picking the cubes off the tray, popping them into their mouths. Did their mothers whisper prayers of thanksgiving like I did the moment the shot went into my arm?

When I wrote my first book, Lessons Learned, I uncovered more about the polio epidemic and the community response. Children were quarantined. Schools were cancelled, as were all activities involving children including baseball games, swimming in pools, movie theaters and Sunday School. Sound familiar? And all this with no internet to entertain bored children. Interesting fact, the librarian at the county library assured the public that the germ was not passed through the library books brought by bookmobiles. At least books were available.

I interviewed many people of that era. They remembered it vividly even a half century later. Newspaper accounts reporting the vaccine clinics added to the story as I wrote. 

The lessons we learned about the polio epidemic no doubt contributed to many decisions made during this latest pandemic. The lessons we are constantly learning about the coVid pandemic will likewise contribute to what comes next. 

I pray nothing of the sort comes next, but I stand firm in my belief that volunteers will be there in the thick of whatever, dedicating themselves to make the world a better place to live.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen