Carly often thinks she isn’t good at doing charitable work. She thinks that as a healthcare professional you feel like you do this all the time with your patients. But let’s be honest, you do get paid to do this. So, it isn’t really benevolent, but it does make you, as the ‘volunteer’, feel good about yourself. Carly looks back on her long and varied career. She is glad she became a doctor. It afforded her a huge amount of variety and, in some instances, creativity. But this story isn’t going to be her work curriculum vitae (CV). No that is done and dusted. Well, pretty much so. Carly has an excellent part-time package to return to the UK from Jaffa to see patients in person for some of the year and get paid for it. So, in Israel, where she moved in September 2023, she has had loads of time on her hands. The bureaucracy at first was a huge and unfortunately necessary time waster.
But this has passed, and not long after she arrived, the war started. So, Carly really felt the overwhelming societal pull to volunteer. She thinks that she either isn’t good at it or dislikes it. She wonders a great deal who actually benefits from all this relentless volunteering. At the Whittington Hospital, where she works in London, she sees some very noble volunteers in tabards trying to direct patients and relatives where they need to go. However, she has worked there for over two decades and helps inordinate numbers of lost people. She actually goes up and asks them if they are lost. They often are and she can help redirect them to the right place. It is astonishing in this day and age that no one takes signage that seriously and these punters are often already worried and anxious to be in a hospital. But Carly puts on her friendly face and tries to help those looking shell-shocked and overwhelmed.
And anyway, Carly does have a track record of volunteering. She ran a local playgroup for years. When that finished, she planned to be a scout leader. But that was full of weird older men wanting to wear a military style uniform and spend their free time shouting at kids. No thank you very much. She had enough exposure to other people’s kids at work and didn’t want to start bellowing any more than she did already.
Carly then went on to volunteer on the Chevra Kadisha as someone who helped prepare bodies for burial according to Jewish tradition. She felt she could be good at this. There was something not only very satisfying, but also calming in the procedures followed. And it didn’t matter if you were young or old, rich or poor, you all ended up with the same shroud garments before being gently placed in a coffin. Carly worked there for many years on a Sunday morning. She found it cathartic and enveloping. The cemetery had expanded, and the new area for the Chevra Kadisha was surprisingly poorly designed. This coincided with Carly’s divorce. She felt she no longer needed to cover her head. But she was told she did as that is the rule. Anyway, she had done it for long enough and so she quietly, yes even Carly can do that on occasion, left.
Carly then had a bit of a volunteering nadir. Most of the time was taken up with Covid and then preparing for her move to Israel so she let that one go, without too much self-flagellation. This is in the metaphysical sense. Carly wasn’t a fan of the whip. Even when horse riding, she would rarely take a whip and if she did have a truculent mare or gelding, she could break off a branch to use instead, more as a threat than to inflict pain. She muses on the word ‘gelding’. This is a neutered male. She would like to have ridden a stallion but let’s be honest here. Carly can stay on a horse walking, trotting, cantering and even galloping. But she cannot control a headstrong stallion who might rear-up at any moment. We digress. Back to volunteering. Carly thought you could be a better mother, daughter, sister, doctor, and friend and that should be counted towards or instead of your charitable giving but really, she wasn’t able to think of something useful to do. So, she just carried on working and doing her stuff.
Once Carly could find no more excuses, she submits to social pressure and agrees to volunteer. She prefers to offer her time randomly and not for too many hours. Also, she needs to be able to communicate in English. Despite her commitment to living in Israel, learning the language seems to be a non-starter for Carly. There are many ways to learn Hebrew. She could do an online course. But she would just spend her time fiddling about on her phone and not really concentrating. She did start an in-person Ulpan. This is the recognised way for new immigrants to learn to speak Hebrew. She signed up for a 10-week course. It was three mornings a week for four hours each time. It was in a classroom setting. Carly was by far and away the oldest. She just couldn’t sit still. Her classmates were all between a third and half of her age. She wriggled around on the hard school seat and did, sort of, try.
In her family they have a rule that you need to try at least two sessions before agreeing to continue. She did this and said firmly, “No, get me out of here!” Then she tried private lessons with a lovely teacher in his home. She spent a lot of time not doing her homework, playing with his beautiful cats and avoiding doing much speaking at all. She lasted for a total of seven lessons. And then she remembered. When she was 18, Carly came on her gap year between school and university to Israel. She did a three-month army course. She felt standing there with someone pointing an M16 gun at her, she would learn Hebrew fast. But she didn’t. Yes, she was super fit by the end and could do 50 press-ups and 100 sit-ups. But still couldn’t communicate. She was good with nouns and appalling at declining verbs. Well, anything to do with verbs. It was hardly surprising she couldn’t learn the language 40 years on.
But there is lots of volunteering where no communication is involved. Like food preparation or fruit picking. She started off in a cafe to make food for evacuees and soldiers. She spent hours cutting up frozen chicken into thin slices for schnitzel. Many of the volunteers seemed a bit clumsy and would often drop bits of chicken on the floor. Washing it wasn’t deemed hygienic enough, so she persuaded the leaders to let her have these rejected pieces for her dog. She had a huge amount to take home at the end of the shift. She washed the chicken and cooked it in a multitude of ways for herself. Talulah, her dog, had a bit but mostly it was for Carly. At the food prep place, if Carly was well-behaved, she could progress onto putting food into containers. Funny how there was even a hierarchy here. Much like at work.
Working in agriculture was incredibly hard. A strain on your back and you were expected to do it for hours. Carly couldn’t last in Ulpan for hours and certainly not in the fields. She often managed to borrow a car and take friends and Talulah with. She picked a lot of citrus fruits this way for a few hours and then it was off for a fancy lunch nearby. There were often young people from America on volunteer programmes. They loved throwing oranges for Talulah to catch and return to them. Win win. Once when Carly was up a ladder with her sacks stuffed to the brim with lemons, she felt the ladder start to sway to one side. She really wanted to manage alone. So, she held onto a branch and used her legs to right the ladder. Phew. No embarrassing moments! She was with a load of Mexicans and her Spanish is about as bad as her Hebrew.
She once went to a teaching hospital south of Tel Aviv. She enjoyed the session but was never asked back. Carly says to herself “That speaks volumes”. She also did some silk painting with children who were evacuated from their homes. But they just didn’t have the patience for this.
Her favourite volunteering was with goats. Normally on Christmas day, Carly works in the hospital. She loves the camaraderie, and she doesn’t celebrate this festival. But in Israel, her friend Linda found out about goat herding. Goats can only eat whilst walking and need herders to keep them out of danger. So, they set off to get to the farm at 7am. They took 600 heavily pregnant goats for their daily walk over and then along a pretty well used highway. Lots of trucks and speedy cars. It was quite an effort to get these obviously very ‘herdy’ animals to go to where they were supposed to be. One goat would say. “Hey, fellow sisters, let’s see if there is some yummy grass over there”. Which might mean stumbling back onto the road. One brave goat followed by 599 of her best girlfriends. But they were pretty easy to redirect. Linda and Carly were whacked out at the end of this 4-hour walk. But they now have a new ritual for Xmas day they say to themselves.
They decided to return the following month but on arrival the family seemed displeased to see them. The goats had given birth and were too busy getting milked and feeding their kids to be going on walks foraging for food. So, Linda and Carly instead bottle-fed the straggler kids who were too low down in the hierarchy to do it for themselves. It seems that not all kids are fed by their mothers. And when you have 600 to choose from you can see it can be tricky to choose the right mother…
Luckily, Carly had and breastfed her children whilst living in a single-family dwelling rather than a commune. Carly chuckles at the thought of this intimate feeding being a free-for-all.
