February 2013 Covering Brewster, Eastham, Harwich, Orleans and Wellfleet
More Info:
NausetNeighbors.org
508-514-7067 |
Please join us for our Second Anniversary Party and Volunteer Celebration on Thursday, February 14 at 1 PM at the Brewster Ladies’ Library. Please respond to our E-vite that has been emailed to you or call 508-514-7067.
We have posted our Volunteer Handbook online, which you can see here. There is also a link to it on the sidebar of the newsletter.
Lisa Thimas is one of our many volunteers who go above and beyond. Lisa spends some time every winter in Florida with her husband. She won’t be able to drive our members while she’s there, but that won’t stop her from sending you the weekly online sign up letter with her little gems and pearls, and to take her shift each week as a call manager. The Internet is a brave new world. Why, some of us may even remember when this would not have been possible.
It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen, and it comes with the territory.
Susan Milton arrived one day to pick up one of our members and found her on the floor in back of the door. She had spent the night on the kitchen floor. The member was a trooper. She said it “happened often.” We can all understand why she shrugged it off. We all want to stay in our homes and be independent as long as possible. Perhaps we’ve seen this same behavior in our own families.
Susan immediately called the member’s doctor and arranged for an appointment within an hour. However, on second consideration and because the member appeared too weak to get into Susan’s truck, Susan cancelled the appointment and called 911. The rescue squad came, checked the member out, but she declined to go to the hospital. Susan took the member’s grocery list and did her shopping, but when she returned, the member had fallen again. This time Susan alerted the concierge on duty in the independent living community where the member resides.
We all believe Susan assessed a difficult situation and used her excellent judgment to act as a good neighbor would act. In addition, if she had wanted another good neighbor’s opinion at the time, she could have called Nauset Neighbors and spoken with a call manager.
Immediately upon being apprised of the situation, Nauset Neighbors called the member’s daughter, who lives off cape. Our Services Assessment Committee was established for these kinds of problems.
The member spent a short time in the hospital and then in a rehab facility. The rescue squad made a recommendation for an outreach worker from the Council on Aging to visit the member, the member will wear a life alert necklace or bracelet, and a recommendation was made for the member to participate in the daily check-in Reassurance Program of the Police Department.
As we go about our daily tasks of helping our neighbors, we may be there for an incident in progress, rare though it is. We continually remind our volunteers that if they have any concerns, any concerns, they let us know by calling or emailing us….an ounce of prevention and all that. Perhaps for some of our members we have to be proactive in getting them a life alert device or into a check-in program, but to do that, we need input.
Nauset Neighbors is a strong and vibrant network of neighbors helping neighbors. We play an important role as the eyes and ears in an aging community.
We now have 155 members in 134 households, a 167% increase over one year ago. They are being helped by 216 volunteers, a 40% increase over a year ago. 55% have been active within the last three months. It is winter now, and many of our volunteers are off cape. January services were near an all-time high, with about 160 services. The total number of services in the past 52 weeks is 1505.
Volunteers are now filling about 75% of all services via online signup, reducing the number of calls and emails that need to be sent out. Members are now requesting rides to medical appointments well in advance, which helps fill them online. We have 170 future services of which 112 already have volunteers assigned.
We were able to offer membership to everyone who was on our waiting list in January, due in part to the 18 new volunteers who joined us in January, many of whom have already provided services to members. We have about 12 additional potential volunteers in the pipeline, and another volunteer orientation meeting is scheduled for February.
-Dick Elkin
Each of us, members and volunteers alike, has our own unique story, some unusual and surprising, some rising to the level of compelling and enchanting. We're not a bunch of creepy old people. Each month we'll tell you a little about a volunteer or member of our community.
There is a theme in Aylette Jenness’ life, and you find it in the books she has written.
Pick up her book, Along the Niger River, An African Way of Life, look at the pictures, skim the text and find yourself compelled to read more. It is about 1974 Yelwa in the northwestern corner of Nigeria before Al Qaeda’s North African wing reared its ugly head, before the 2012 suicide bombs in Yelwa’s churches. Aylette spent three years in Nigeria then and produced a memorable photo documentary of a way of life long gone. The pictures and text are fascinating, and now forty years later, Aylette’s daughter has digitized hundreds of old photographs and they are working together on a website that will make them available to universities, libraries and other interested parties.
Pick up her book, In Two Worlds: A Yip’uk Eskimo Family. Aylette first went to Scammon Bay, Alaska on the coast of the Bering Sea in 1962. The village had no roads, about 125 people, no other inhabitants within a day’s walk. She arrived with her anthropologist husband, a two-year-old, a newborn, pen, paper, camera and an inquiring mind, and stayed for a year and a half. Her stories about diapers and baby food did not make it into the books she wrote of her time there.
Aylette went back to Scammon Bay in 1985. The village, connected to the world by telephone, satellite dish and plane, had grown to about 350 people, and Aylette became friends with Alice Rivers, who was born in the village. The two collaborated on In Two Worlds, an account of Alice’s family in their traditional world and in the world as it was in 1985.
Fast forward over twenty five years to the present. There are about 450 people in Scammon Bay now and it remains physically isolated, but Aylette knows from Alice that much has changed. While the children in 1985 had computers in school and played video games like the children in the other states, there was no Internet. Aylette is looking forward to returning to Scammon Bay hopefully within the year to witness the changes there in our hyper-connected world.
Pick up her books, Families, A Celebration of Diversity, Commitment, and Love (1990), and Come Home with Me: A Multicultural Treasure Hunt (1993) that Aylette wrote during her twenty four year tenure at the Boston Children’s Museum developing exhibitions, programs, festivals and workshops. Both books took on topics difficult for the time and paved new ground. Families asked what families were, and answered, “Your family is the people who take care of you, who care about you.” Seventeen young people described their families, and gay and lesbian families were included in the mix, groundbreaking for the time. Come Home with Me, a “Kids Bridge” book of the museum later made into an interactive video and exhibit, dealt head on with issues of prejudice and discrimination that kids found in their lives. The Children’s Museum in multicultural Boston was one of the first children’s museums to feature these issues, but it was not known how it would be received. Through a “Talk Back Board,” also not common in museums then, they learned the exhibit had been successful.
Aylette traveled to other places and wrote other books, but there is space only for the highlights here. Her lifework is beautiful, and clearly she is not done.
Aylette is both a member and a volunteer for Nauset Neighbors. Hers is the voice that members hear after a service is completed and asks how it went. She says she has the best job at Nauset Neighbors because she continually hears the gratitude of our members. She is the right person for that job. There are reasons for the rest of us to be grateful to her.
-Esther Elkin
|