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I am too poor to donate money because of school. So it is mostly volunteering that I do. A lot of it was after school and/or lunchtime tutoring during my high school years. It was poorly organised by another student and me. We did not have any teacher to report to. One of the programs we did turned into "charity". The "tuition fee" we recieved was used to buy and repair musical instruments for the school. To this day, I don't know if it was correct or legal but the teachers and principal were happy with the result. The students we tutored didn't complain about paying money either.
Volunteering at an elderly home was done during university. It was my first time doing that and it was incredibly heartbreaking. Majority of the nurses were cruel. They shouted very loudly and treated the elderly like misbehaving kids. A lot of things were unfamiliar to me so I was too afraid to report back to my volunteer supervisor about how the nurses acted. My individual way of counteracting this was to spend more time with them even after the "dinner help" assigned for me. There was one time when I visited an old woman before dinner. She was crying and mumbling to herself while lying on the bed. A nurse came in and said with a loud and piercing voice, "Cheer up! It is time for dinner!" She did not ask her what is wrong or pay attention when the woman said "I don't want to go." She put her in the wheelchair in a very harsh way, asked me to take her to the cafeteria and left. So I just talked to the woman and hugged her. She reluctantly agreed to go eat when I promised to sit beside her. There were many times I cried after I returned home. When the elderly home moved to a location too far to go by bus, I quit.
So far, I think I am a newbie with volunteer organisations focusing on adults. Majority of my experience was inside my old schools or other schools (e.g. organising summer school activities for senior kindergarten and Primary 1 students). Things with children and teenagers are much simpler and less emotional for me, because there is so much more hope for them even if they are currently in bad situations. With the elderly, I feel depressed afterwards because a lot of them are in palliative care.
Hard to say why I do this. It is somewhat of a habit since Form 3. Since it isn't a bad habit, I don't have to quit. My boyfriend was forced to volunteer when he was in high school so he doesn't like it. He was also helping at an elderly home. That is generally a bad introduction to volunteer so I don't blame him. It is an "agree to disagree" situation but I recently asked him if he would give it a second chance and do something different. He agreed and hopefully we will either be teaching or building houses within this year.
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