Confessions of a charity volunteer
An anonymous Aucklander gives the low-down on the complexities of working for nothing.
An anonymous Aucklander gives the low-down on the complexities of working for nothing.
At my stage of life, just past retirement age, I realise it’s all right to let go of old dreams. It’s okay to accept that I’ll never open the batting for New Zealand, make a criminal barrister or be the first anthropologist to record a newly discovered language. I’ll never be a chef either, though I’m handy in the kitchen. The closest I’ll come is making coleslaw for 120 and doing my best not to grate too much of my knuckles into the mix. Or peeling 10-dozen boiled eggs. Or scraping off the remains of porridge encrusted on a bain-marie dish.
These and other jobs have occupied my Monday mornings for the past six months in the kitchen of the Haeata Centre at the Auckland City Mission. At Haeata, volunteers, under the guidance of a chef, prepare and serve two meals a day, 365 days a year, and the need for unpaid kitchen labour is endless.
I love playing my part and I look forward to my weekly shift: jocular insults fly thick and fast and the kitchen rings with laughter. But amid the pot-scrubbing, can-opening and vegetable-chopping,
I’ve found plenty of time to ruminate on the nature of working for nothing and to think about what it is that I, without even realising it, might be expecting in return.
Perhaps it’s nothing more than the warm, fuzzy feeling I might get when – as I tell myself – I am doing something for nothing. But I sometimes notice a little surge of resistance when someone in the food line asks for an extra ladleful. Bubbling beneath it, I realise, is an expectation that he is not playing his assigned role, which is one of explicit and slightly obsequious gratitude. Like Oliver Twist, he is not supposed to ask for more.
Every time it happens, I am fascinated anew, because the feeling is such a corruption of the urge that brought me here. He wants; he gets. There are precious few moments in his life, I suspect, when that is the case.
Who am I to expect a “thank you”? Sure, it’s nice when it comes, as from the (presumably Japanese) chap who bows deeply to each of us in turn before leaving or the woman who whispers her appreciation as I wipe down a table. But if I was living the life that some of the Mission clients are living, I imagine I’d be
feeling pretty short on gratitude.
Some of my friends, when I tell them what I’m doing, congratulate me on “giving back”. It’s a phrase I detest, not just because it’s such a glib greeting-card sentiment but also because it’s so inaccurate. The hard-pressed and homeless who eat the food I help to prepare never gave me anything for me to give back, for the very good reason that, for the most part, they have nothing to give.
I know what you’re thinking: the “giving back” means returning to “society” (whatever that is) some of the rewards I have reaped from a lifetime of steady, wellpaid employment. But the structure on which that notion rests is at best a rickety one. It reminds us of the truth of neoliberal economics: that for the well-paid to prosper, those at the bottom of the social heap must languish there.
Tom Scott drew a cartoon in the 1990s that depicted former National Finance Minister Ruth Richardson walking along the dole queue as the record low inflation figure is announced. She is shaking hands with each jobless person, declaring that “we couldn’t have done it without you”.
The easiest way for the well-to-do to “give back” would be to pay more tax and not to vote for political parties that want to lighten their tax burden. No, I don’t see that happening anytime soon, either.
If volunteering is an attempt to assuage middle-class guilt, it’s not working very well for me. Each ladleful of porridge or baked beans, each bowl of coleslaw or fruit salad I fill just sharpens my sense that we are living in a society in which human needs are being filled by charitable institutions because we accept that it’s all right for people to be homeless and hungry.
He is not playing his assigned role, which is one of explicit and slightly obsequious gratitude. Like Oliver Twist, he is not supposed to ask for more.
Let’s call him Tan. It’s not his name, but he didn’t ask to be written about in a magazine. The name he goes by is an English word for a day of the week and was perhaps agreed on with an aid worker, along with a notional date of birth (January 1, 1980), in the refugee camp in Thailand where he spent 20 years – half his life – before coming here.
I haven’t asked him about this, not least because the people at English Language Partners who matched me with him have cautioned against inquiring too deeply
into clients’ pasts. It risks tapping into trauma that we would be ill-equipped to deal with. In any case, Tan wouldn’t have the words to tell me. That’s why I’m sitting at his kitchen table for a couple of hours each week, trying to teach him enough English to prepare him for a group class.
Tan comes from Myanmar (Burma) and is a member of an ethnic group – the Karen people – that has been ruthlessly persecuted for about 60 years. I was told he had no English at all, but when we met, he had mastered the English alphabet, the numbers one to 10 and the days of the week. Otherwise, his vocabulary was probably about 10 words.
So, we labour through the phonemes – the 44 distinct sounds used in English – drilling the difference between pet, bet, net and set and trying to sidestep for later the curlier problems (why does the “o” in “hot” sound different from the one in “go”?).
We laugh a lot, too, as I engage in extravagant role-plays, crouching down to show what “small” means and climbing on a chair to show “big” or raiding his cupboard to show that the pots are “low” and the bowls “high”. He’s got used to my refusing to enter his home until he greets me in a loud clear voice, with a smile and good eye contact, and asks me in. At the start, we did it five times; I kept closing the door and knocking again until he’d satisfied his teacher.
It took a while for him to understand that Kiwi hospitality required him to offer me something to drink. Being hospitable, of course, requires you to have something to offer and, I reflect, that probably doesn’t happen a lot in a refugee camp. Now, he gives me a glass of water when I arrive.
Then, last week, a breakthrough: his first sentence. He had learnt the names of kitchen objects and a few adjectives – of colour and size mainly. With the words all on squares of paper and a large “The” and “is” strategically positioned on the table,
I asked him to fill in the gaps. When he said “The pan is big” and then “The pan is blue”, we danced around his bare lounge, high-fiving each other like we’d won the lottery. Unprompted, he said, “The fridge is white” and “The door is closed”, repeating the sentences like magic incantations. I could have cried.
Volunteering my time and energy delivers something in return much better than a warm fuzzy and I get it in rich measure. It’s the satisfaction to be found in stepping out of the daily grind of self-interest.
It’s an equivalent of the gratitude list that many self-help regimens suggest, a regular chance to count my blessings and remind myself that they are not earned but the result of good fortune. And it’s hard to worry about your own problems when you’re busy doing something for somebody else.
In a society where too many of us are suspicious and resentful of the poor (how quick we are to ask whether they have brought it on themselves) and immigrants (forgetting that every one of us, of every ethnicity, is an immigrant or the descendant of one), it’s a chance to remember the way this country used to be: a place where everyone deserved a fair go, where the me-first philosophy was seen as distasteful rather than admirable. And it gets me out of the house.