e-news25 Mar 2013    Back to newsletter | to TOS website

   Insights through service

Many TOS members have found that their service to others has brought with it a deeper understanding of themselves, of relationships and of the theosophical principles that inspire their service. In the fifth article in this series, TOS member, Olga Gostin of Adelaide, Australia, relates some of the different kinds of service in which she has engaged during her lifetime and reflects upon the motivation she perceives as having given rise to each – from simple self-interest to impersonal and even anonymous giving.
	I was the sixth child in a family of nine siblings.  In these circumstances, everyone had to help out around the house, as can well be imagined.  One could either ‘volunteer’ (and hope to goodness to get one’s choice) or accept the job allocated.  I put up my hand for laundering and darning and left the kitchen to my three sisters and my mother.  This was a choice based on sheer cowardice – laundering mishaps could easily be rectified but cooking disasters could not.  We were poor in the 1950s as recent migrants to South Africa.  Food was sufficient but could not be wasted – indeed our wartime experiences in Belgium put a hallowed aura round the whole business of growing, purchasing and preparing food.  A crème brûlée which was indeed burnt had to be served, vegetables forgotten on the stove while we played volleyball had to be rescued and the smell dissipated before my father got wind of the disaster.
Ah, the luxury of laundering at one’s own pace – though there were snags too: if there was no wind, there was no water, as the pump only provided water erratically, and tank water was sacrosanct for domestic/food use only. Clothes, and especially towels and sheets, then had to be washed at the river.  There was no-one to critique or direct the laundering process at the river, and if the dog did run over the sheets spread out to dry on the bushes, one could always re-rinse and no one would be any the wiser. Thus though my opting for laundering duties was motivated by self-interest and a fear of exposure through inept cooking, it is only fair to observe that I have been playing catch-up in the kitchen ever since. There is some deeper lesson implied in that, I’m sure, and my long-suffering spouse Victor is the recipient of my culinary cowardice of those formative years.
My first significant volunteer work as an adult took place in Papua as a budding anthropologist in the mid-sixties.  It was my first encounter with sheer destitution and I felt dreadfully guilty about my relative affluence compared to the local indigenous people amongst whom I had come to live for two years.  Increasingly I questioned the validity and luxury of being a ‘scientific’ observer of the process of resettlement of the Kuni people who had relocated from their mountainous homelands where the traditional lifestyle could no longer be sustained for a variety of reasons.
I volunteered to apply special medication to the populace on a daily basis, so as to combat the effects of grilly – a very contagious skin disease. This activity, which took up 1-2 hours daily, somehow salved the mind and heart but went totally against the grain of academic practice. When my supervisor from the Australian National University came to visit, she was appalled by my ‘do-gooding’ activities and this led to major realignment of my anthropological mind-set. I challenged her criticism of my approach, refused to stop applying medicine, and was recalled to Canberra. There I had to plead my case that what mattered was academic outcome, not the method of attaining data. It was a double-edged argument, but enough to warrant a change in supervisor and a return to Papua. With hindsight, my supervisor had been right: I wasn’t really cut out to grace the halls of learned academia; I found much of the post-modern debate fatuous and meaningless. Instead, I was irresistibly drawn to working or volunteering with people who needed a boost to achieve their innate potentials.
The next phase in volunteering was in the seventies and eighties when as a wife and mother in Adelaide, I joined forces in kindergarten, then primary and high school fund-raising activities, helping in the canteen, digging holes in the school oval for benches, offering French tuition, joining Parents and Friends Committees and the like.  Life in suburban Australia was totally alien to me and these activities were my initiation into community living and the marvellous institution of self-help and volunteering which is so much part of the fabric of Australian life.  My involvement was nevertheless still somewhat self-interested since it grew out of a concern for the welfare of my own children.
At the same time, however, I was exposed to another, more disinterested type of volunteering revolving around a neighbour who had set up a group of some ten women who would meet twice a week in her garage to make quilts, do T-shirts and provide shawls, blankets and other handiwork as requested by local hospitals, nursing homes and women’s refuges. This was disinterested, collegiate action with the set goal of giving to others without any expectation of a return. Though we have recently moved away from that suburb, I have maintained my connection to this group through knitting endless squares and strips for wheelchair-bound persons. Somebody else puts the bits together, and yet another volunteer delivers the articles as requested. It is very satisfying to be an anonymous link in a chain of contributions which end up on someone’s lap.
There are times when volunteering is non-negotiable; it is a social imperative. Such, for example, was the request from the Adelaide Children’s Hospital (ACH) that I become a temporary surrogate parent to Mauritian children who were flown from the island to Adelaide for open-heart surgery. The flight was at the city’s expense and the operation was free, as a gift from the surgeon, Dr Goldblatt, and the ACH. No adults accompanied the children and our home became their refuge for three weeks prior to the operation and two weeks thereafter. I had been targeted by the hospital because we were then hosting Mauritian tertiary students and French is my home language. The five years of association with Mauritian kids enriched us way more than we ever contributed to the children’s wellbeing. What was particularly edifying was that one volunteered as a part of a team doing just what had to be done – no fuss, no ceremony, no formal recognition. In time, South Africa became a cheaper option for surgery for Mauritians and the Adelaide connection wound down.
Much the same imperative applied in the late seventies when we became involved with Vietnamese refugees. Here again, the ramifications of volunteering extended way beyond one’s relatively insignificant contribution. In 1978 we rallied to a call for host families or mentors for new arrivals in Adelaide and went to the Refugee Association’s gathering intending to link up with a family with children roughly the same age as our own, then seven and five years old. As luck would have it, the call came through the loudspeaker asking for any French speakers, and despite a gut-feeling that a roller-coaster journey was about to unfold, we identified ourselves and landed five teenagers, cousins aged 15-19. This is neither the time nor the place to relate the ups and downs of our joint journey of the past four decades, but I do want to share the following anecdote.
		Whereas the Refugee Association provided a flat for the young people, the furnishing and rigging out of amenities was our problem. I remember taking my trusty wheelbarrow down our street and collecting crockery, cutlery, bedding, chairs and lamps from our wonderful neighbours. I made a point of bypassing one house since I knew that the husband had been in Vietnam as a soldier and had returned traumatised, and not at all sympathetic to the refugee cause. Within an hour his wife came to my door inquiring why I had bypassed her house. I shared my reasoning. She just took me by the shoulders: “Where there is need, there is need. Full stop. Come to my place with your car: we have beds to spare.” Need one say more?
It would not do to itemise ‘successful’ volunteering without mentioning an important fiasco, relating to what I would call ‘possessive’ volunteering. It was 2000, I had just retired from the Aboriginal Task Force where I had taught tertiary Indigenous students for 30 years, and I was at a loose end. My daughter suggested I volunteer at her NGO, the Mental Illness Fellowship of South Australia. The kitchen needed a volunteer to help preparing lunches for the clients and help train people with mental illness to take some responsibility in this task. Over the next two years I discovered an interesting, and not so edifying aspect to my personal involvement as a volunteer. While still a ‘new chum’, I enthusiastically learned the ropes, monitored supplies of bread and condiments, and supervised the washing up and cleaning of the kitchen, all the time engaging clients to take control. As the months passed, though, I became aware of waste and other practices which were strictly speaking not mine to own, much less redress. What had started as volunteering based on caring neutrality, gradually became a source of internal questioning and critique. It came to me suddenly and very clearly that I had made a mental shift from volunteering to ‘owning’ some of the issues. It was time to sack myself and disengage without hurting others or undermining their practices. Volunteering is not about imposing one’s imprint on anything. It is about working with others, within their pre-determined order. Sometimes things change for the better; sometimes it is better to call it a day. What is absolutely certain, to my mind at least, is that ego and volunteering are a bad mix.
Now in my seventies, I reflect with some amusement on my ongoing volunteering at the Adelaide Botanical Gardens.  As I have poor retentive memory, I am not a guide (a prestigious, high-level and well publicised type of volunteering) but simply provide directions to visitors who come to the Information Centre. It may be as simple as showing where the nearest toilet or drinking fountain is, or as challenging as identifying the garden bed where a particular plant may be found. This is low-level volunteering, and several of my fellow volunteers have expressed frustration at our lack of status.  I think this concern touches at the very heart of the whole business of volunteering: it is not about self-preservation, the assuaging of guilt, benefits or self-promotion, social imperatives or bursting the ego bubble – though all of these may well have played a role at some time in one’s life.
In the end, I think, it is about being there, doing what needs to be done, and letting it go. I look forward to the day when an anonymous rug will land on my own knees, and I hope that I may yet be lucid enough to bless the multitude of fingers that contributed to that gift.

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