Growth and Revival: Volunteer Services Provided by Helping Professionals


By Laleh Skrenes, Ph.D.,RCC, CCC, and Jack Jardine, BSW, MA, Contributing Writers


This summer, I was involved in High River, providing Psychological First Aid on a volun- teer basis. I was part of the multi-disciplinary team from British Columbia. We were help- ing citizens of Alberta recover from the worst natural disaster in Canadian history. It was dirty, hot, and the hours were long. Yet in dia- logue at the end of the hard days, when my fellow volunteers talked of their own experi- ences in the event, they used words such as “transformative”, “spiritual”, “community”, and “respect”. Days and weeks after, the volun- teers related their renewed sense of purpose and focus, and gratitude for having had the experience.


These thoughtful comments caused me to reflect on my own beliefs around the nature of volunteer service. Like everyone else, helping professionals need to take care of themselves, or we burn out. We relax and re- energize through exercise, hobbies, or social events. We go on vacation. My colleagues in High River illustrated to me once again how volunteer service to others can enhance one’s own sense of well being and bolster our positive regard for the world around us. Gandhi said, “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”1


Our team met each morning to prepare for the day. It was a time to form ourselves as a team, to gird ourselves for the tasks ahead, and to get a sense of where we would be and what we would face in the coming hours. At the end of the day, tired, disheveled and a little shell shocked we came together again to inform each other of the key events of the day, and to make human contact with each other, to care for each other. In relation with and in observation of the people who were


living in this disaster, from the survivors, to the first responders and the other helpers, the essential struggles of life were highlighted and compounded by the dynamics of crisis. Abdul-Baha stated that “a soldier is no good general until he has been in the front of the fiercest battle and has received the deepest wounds.”2 Our team provided comfort, guid- ance, and support to people experiencing the most trying of circumstances. We did this with no offices or resources except that which we cobbled together, we worked with what we had. And along with the residents, we be- came stronger and, more resilient.


There was an incredible sense of the “here and now”. My concerns and anxieties were pushed aside to meet the needs of the mo- ment. Most of the people I met had lost their homes, and everything they owned. Their photo books were gone, their mementos, their touchstones to their lives: gone. Time af- ter time, I talked with people who were strug- gling back to the surface, after being engulfed by the maelstrom. Repeatedly I “walked and talked”. I helped people get items from the Red Cross to their cars. It was during this practical help that people would off-handedly comment on how they lost their house, or their friend was removed to another town, or their insurance company was refusing to reimburse them. The balance was between helping them shoulder the burden, to dis- charge a little of their stress and distress, and yet leave them in shape to carry on.


I met an elderly man who was travelling when he received a phone call that his house was in danger of being destroyed by the flood. Af- ter days of trying to get home, his house was gone and his pet had perished in the flood.


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