ESS exercise

We had an ESS exercise yesterday.

What's ESS, I hear you say?  Emergency Support Services.  Nowadays.  It used to be Emergency Social Services.  We are the people who, when there is a disaster, make sure everybody (well, as many as we can find) have food, and clothes, and a place to stay, for the immediate aftermath.  We do big disasters, like when four thousand people are displaced from their homes by a wildfire.  We also do small disasters, like when someone is burned out of their apartment.  There are a lot more small disasters, but a disaster is a disaster, for the person it affects.

We had an ESS exercise yesterday.  I'd forgotten how much fun they were.  We put up signs, put out tables, took down some of the signs because we weren't doing those parts, moved the tables around, took some tables away and set the chairs out for a waiting area, and generally made a bunch of mistakes.  Of course, that's the whole point of an exercise.  We make the mistakes during the exercise, so that we make fewer mistakes when we're doing it for real.

We don't want to make mistakes when we are doing it for real, because we are dealing with people who, as we frequently say, are going through the worst experience of their lives.  (And then there's my *other* volunteer work: for the hospice society.  I must be a really depressing person to talk to about volunteer opportunities.)  You are not going to get an awful lot of thanks out of the people that we are helping.  They are going to complain.  They are going to be impolite.  They are going to be inconsiderate.  That's because they are going through the worst experience of their lives.  They are not going to thank you for the help: they are going to complain that there isn't more help, or the right type of help, or something that they want, but don't actually need.  They're stressed, and they're not thinking clearly.  But you don't do this kind of work, this kind of volunteer work, if you are looking for gratitude, thanks, or recognition.

These are my people.  They are there to help.  That is the only reason they are there.  You're not getting paid, you're not getting much recognition, you are working long hours, you were working with people who are extremely stressed, you are not getting thanked.  The only reason anybody volunteers for ESS is because they want to help.

Which is the other reason, besides being able to make dumb mistakes, that it's so much fun to go through an ESS exercise.  These are my people.  They are only there because they want to help people.  When they ask how your week has been, and you say you've had a bad week, they want to know why.  They do actually want to know why you have had a bad week.  They want to know what the problem is.  They want to know how they can help, if they can help.

So there's probably a bit of irony in the fact that, after every exercise, we are all thinking (and sometimes say), "Can't wait for the next regional disaster, when we can all get together again!"