Focus: vocations and volunteering Catherine Prescott


Age cannot wither them


Jetting off to the rainforest or to a far-flung African village as a well-intentioned volunteer used to be the preserve of school leavers. But now more mature applicants are rushing for their own slice of adventure


O


n many Sunday afternoons, retired teacher Leo Duffy would fight his way through the jungle that gripped the steep inside slopes of


El Salvador’s Santa Ana volcano with a team of 10 schoolboys and take them rowing on the crater lake below. He and his wife Angela, lay Catholics from


Chorley in Lancashire, were volunteering as teachers with Bosco Volunteer Action (Bova), the overseas volunteering organisation of the Salesians in the United Kingdom. Since their retirement 10 years ago, they have travelled to Africa, Asia and Latin America on short- term volunteer placements. In El Salvador, they taught English and computer skills to children otherwise at risk of being trapped by street violence and gang culture. “We felt safe, but most locals were very


wary,” says Leo Duffy. “All houses had steel doors and iron grilles, the shops had armed guards and even our school had barbed wire around the perimeter.” Nonetheless, he con- cludes: “We found a better way to spend our retirement. We’ve learnt that people are the same the world over, they just need oppor- tunities. Don Bosco is doing a wonderful job giving children a trade so they can earn money when they leave us.” The Duffys are not the only retirees eager


to experience life in another part of the world. As thousands of 18-year-olds cancel their gap- year plans in the rush to university before next year’s hike in tuition fees, opportunities to volunteer overseas are opening up to a more mature generation.


Although I was brought up a Christian, I have struggled with my belief in a loving God, especially after working and travelling in Uganda and Rwanda. How could a loving, all-powerful God allow a child to be raped and killed, and stuffed down a latrine in the Rwandan genocide? Taking the example of Jesus, who sided with the poor and marginalised, means recognising that healing broken lives entails more than throwing bread from our figurative castles to the poor below. It demands that we are less like a benefactor and more like a neighbour. I have been doing a gap year with the Jesuit


Volunteer Community (JVC) in the north of England. I arrived in inner-city Salford in November after taking part in a retreat with the volunteers from each of the three communities


12 | THE TABLET | 25 June 2011


travel to Ethiopia with the charity for six weeks to teach English to street children, for her previous teaching experience overseas with VSO and the British Council. “They wanted a mature perspective. I’m not a typical vol- unteer,” she says. “I’m not starry-eyed – I just see a problem to be solved.” While the Duffys and Kassell offered teach-


ing, Eileen Thomas saw her retirement at 65 as an opportunity to deploy her nursing skills overseas. Through a friend she encountered the health-care work of the Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul in Thigio, a vil- lage in the hills outside Nairobi. “I wasn’t quite ready to hang up my working


Angela and Leo Duffy (back row, in hats) with Salesian volunteers in Azerbaijan


“We’ve had no applications at all from ‘gap- pers’ this year,” says Fr Tim Curtis, director of the Wimbledon-based Jesuit Missions, who usually sends students for six months to a year on placements in Africa, Asia and South America. “Instead, we’re sending more people who are mid-career or taking early retirement.” Nonetheless, that has its advantages, accord- ing to Fr Curtis, who adds: “Our aim is provide a service, so the more experience a person has, the more they have to offer.” More and more charities and volunteer


organisations are seeing the value of including older participants in their programmes. Cafod chose Theresa Kassell, 63, who is about to


shoes,” she says. “I hoped, vaguely, to find a voluntary post where my life’s experience might be of value to others.” In this semi-arid area, HIV infection rates are high, so the nuns provide medical facilities and other services for people who are poor and marginalised. When Eileen witnessed their work first hand, she found an urgent need for her nursing spe- cialism – palliative care. On her first visit, she accompanied the local community nurse on her home visits to Aids patients; since then, she has returned for three months each year. “Exposure to poverty via the media in no way prepared me for the reality,” she says. For professionals with skills to share, vol- unteer placements can last longer than a couple of weeks or months. Progressio, for example, takes older volunteers on two-year placements as “development workers” with a particular specialism. Fifty-year-old Fi Oakes, who is an HIV adviser for Progressio


Beans and football


Following Jesus’ exhortation to help the poor and needy means more than throwing a few crumbs from the rich man’s table, as volunteer Marianne Alton found out in Manchester


– Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham. With the support of the JVC staff, I launched into my first placement. It was here that I hoped to learn how to be a good neighbour. JVC sent me to the Windsor Drop-in Centre


in Salford for those who are homeless or in danger of becoming homeless. As well as offering subsidised healthy meals, shower and laundry facilities, and GP and dental services, the centre offers clients counselling,


information, advice and guidance, plus a programme of activities designed to give them new skills and raise their self-esteem. For one man, involvement in the centre’s


Raising Aspirations programme led to him signing up to take qualifications in cleaning and food hygiene. Another enrolled on an access course, and hopes to go to university in the future. Another said the support there enabled him to stay out of prison: “If it wasn’t


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