If you think students spend all their spare time avoiding studying, going out with their mates and having a good time then you'd be right. Well our student bloggers do anyway. While they assure us they don't slack on the study, they've got a lot to answer for when it comes to enjoying themselves while volunteering.

All | Emma | Oli | Daniel | Carrie | Olivia | Fiona | Sammy | Ashley | Rochelle | Natalie | Tom | TomG | Harry

Wednesday Dec 10, 2008

Pre-Christmas Ramble

  Just a short update before my term finally ends and I return home to Scarborough – where I can still get some meals cooked for me. Get in.

  Staving off the nihilistic rage, I have been doing a bit of flyering for the winter volunteering opportunities I mentioned in my last blog. It's quite enjoyable really - you watch people squirm to get away from you, some outright ignoring you, and others regarding you suspiciously as they walk by. Of course, most people just take the flyer, and some are even a bit enthusiastic about it.

  I tried to be as friendly as I could be, and not to shove anything in front of people's faces. The entrance into our union at Shef Uni is (probably like most unions) like a crowded maze of people trying to hand you things, usually advertising the latest night of drinking under oddly disconcerting names – Carnage, Brain Damage, Liver Cancer (ok I made that one up) etc.

  As I was flyering for volunteering I thought that a) this was ok, and b) it should be done in a different way to the profit making promotions around us. So I tried to only give flyers to people who had first said that they were interested, although I did stop everyone who past me and asked if they were in fact interested.

  My mate thinks differently. He cited Red Nose Day and Comic Relief as getting money for people who need it by forcing the issue – a TV version of shoving a flyer in your face and saying people need your money (ok, maybe a little more subtle). Otherwise, he said, they simply wouldn't get the funds needed to help.

  So should volunteering, and more especially fundraising, become profit driven? Is it simply the higher cash taken = the better job done. This is definitely Oxfam's way of looking at things.

 Or should we keep in mind the fact that a lot of the problems we want to help are possibly linked to everyone's exuberance for chasing money (homelessness, poverty, even mental health issues)?   

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On a lighter and better note, David Blunkett recently announced that he's keen to see people from 16-25 years old do a period of 'intensive' volunteering for at least 6 months, to bind us all together (obviously). My friend spotted this gem in the article:

When asked whether the scheme should become a form of compulsory national service Mr Blunkett replied: "It's been reinforced to me in the last year that you can't have volunteering unless it's voluntary."

Gold Star for David.

Posted by Harry ( 12:27 AM )
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Friday Dec 05, 2008

Chinatown....

Sorry it's been a while – luckily I can blame it on my new job, which annoyingly means I have less time to volunteer, and the cold, which makes me type really slowly...!

As the weeks have gone by in Marie Curie I got to grips with the demon till and unleashed a plague of incorrect change and incoherent beepings upon the unsuspecting customers. Add to this the fact that the steamer, which we use to make sure everything is pressed and beautiful before it goes on the shop floor was making the lights fuse and the customers flee for daylight and an idea of the weekly mayhem starts to emerge!

Finally, just as things started to quiet down, I slid a box of patterned china plates off the desk.... Seeming to fall in slow motion, the fragmented pieces of white china covered in curling yellow daffodils cascaded to the floor in an avalanche and swept from the till to the window display at the far end of the shop. For a long moment everything was silent – customers turned round, I looked at the mess and the customers looked at me. I was totally frozen in embarrassed horror but just as I was wishing the floor would open and swallow me a voice behind me said, 'We'll have to think of a nickname for you now' and everybody started to laugh.

Suddenly there was a long queue at the till and everyone was sympathising and making jokes and teasing. The china was marked from a 30 piece set to a 22 and the day went on, broken plates being rapidly overshadowed by the memories of another volunteer who told us how when in her twenties, she and her friends had travelled across the country by train every time a ship came in and spent the day going about with the sailors!! Now in her seventies and dosed on steroids (or 'stair-rods' as one regular calls them), her tales of how her grandmother had greeted her boyfriends by looking at the label inside their coat had us all doubled up, helpless with laughter.

If you want to look at volunteering in a local Marie Curie shop in your area have a look at the website, which has vacancies for fundraising, admin and other kinds of volunteering too.

Posted by Olivia ( 3:00 PM )
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