Last week I helped out at a pride barbecue event at a church. (Wait, a pride event? At a *church*?) I helped out with a bit of the setup, and then I took over barbecuing the hot dogs.
There is a bit of an art to barbecuing for a large group of people. You have to keep track of how much stock you have in reserve, and you have to send people for more if the reserves get low, and you have to ensure that you have enough hot dogs barbecued, and ready to go into buns, for the people who are likely to show up in the next five minutes (and, of course, nobody ever signs up, precisely, for when they are going to show up), so you have to do a fair bit of guessing, and a fair bit of scanning of the crowd, and noting who has recently arrived, and you have to put uncooked hot dogs on the grill, and you have to move the cooked wieners to the upper outside corners of the grill, so that they don't get completely charred, and, in between all of this, you have to put you have to split open the (usually rather dehydrated) buns, and then put a cooked wiener into the bun, and roll up the hot dog in a napkin (so that people can pretend that nobody has ever touched this hot dog before them), and put it on the tray, where you should have at least three, but no more than five, hot dogs for those families who are going to suddenly show up and all want hot dogs, and ... It's a non-trivial task.
It helps if anyone else understands the needs, and comes to let you know how many people have showed up in the last couple of minutes, or help open up buns, and roll up the hot dogs in the napkins, or find out whether you are down to the last two wieners in the batch and might possibly have to have somebody run to the kitchen to find out if there are, in fact, any more wieners on hand, but nobody ever does.
Doing this on a portable barbecue, placed on a utility table, means that you may spend two solid hours kind of hunched over, making sure that the wieners are getting cooked, but not too charred.
I didn't really realize, until the event was over, just how sore my back was. I mean, in a way, it's my own fault. I have arthritis, and I have degenerating discs. What did I *think* was going to happen? Why didn't I pay attention to how my back was feeling, as it was going on, rather than staying hunched over the grill for two hours, and ending up in serious pain?
Well, good point. The thing is, when you are focused on a task, and particularly when you are focused on a task for other people, you aren't paying too much attention to your own situation. You aren't looking for signs that you could be in trouble. You aren't paying attention to your own needs. While you are making food for everybody else, do you, in fact, need something to eat? On a very hot day, are you drinking enough water? Given that you are probably drinking more water than usual, are you paying attention to eating something with salt on it, so that you get enough salt to replace the salt that is being washed out of your system by the extra water, and by sweating on a hot day?
So, why am I telling you this? Is it just a complain about the fact that I, alone at all the population of Port Alberni, know about time and motion studies? No, there are a couple of important points to make.
First, in terms of grief, and pain, and depression, and other distresses of the world, I have, at various previous times, noted that volunteering is good for what ails you. If you are in difficulty, and you can't think of a way to address your own difficulty, help someone else. Volunteer. Join a volunteer group. Help out with the barbecue at somebody's event. Sit and listen to that boring person, whom nobody else will listen to because all they do is keep recycling their own petty problems over and over. Help somebody else. If nothing else, you will forget your own problems, if only for a little while.
And the second point is, as a volunteer manager, pay attention to your volunteers. Your volunteers are going to get stuck into that same mindset. They are going to forget their own problems. They are going to be focused on solving the problems of others. They are going to forget to pay attention to their own needs. You have to look to their needs. And, of course, it's not easy, because they aren't even paying attention to their own needs. So, you are going to have to pay attention, and you are going to have to interrupt them, regularly, in order to make sure that they are, in fact, fine, rather than just *saying* fine whenever you ask, "How are you?"
Your volunteers are focused on others. You'd better be focused on them. (And, of course, by extension, every once in awhile you had better stop and think, am I okay?)
Volunteer management - VM - 0.00 - introduction and table of contents
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