Farm to Family Connection - Commentary

FARM TO FAMILY COMMENTARY
---Select commentary from a weekly column by Curt Arens published in the Cedar County News, Hartington, NE

September 2008

Working Together

Dear Friends,
As I’ve written many times, rural folks wear a lot of hats. I didn’t say they have a lot of hats, although I have a closet full of them, but I said that we wear a lot of different hats at different times in different situations. Our roles as volunteers for several different organizations, community civic groups, church and school organizations have many community-minded folks wearing different hats each day.

From time to time, our busy volunteer lives get overwhelming. Whether it is at a church bazaar or a community event, in preparation before the event is to take place, I often hear other organizers and workers complaining under their breath about having to work so hard and for so many hours to make the function go off without a hitch.

It’s a natural response, when we are asked to volunteer, to have some misgivings about not spending that time with family and friends or working our jobs or on our farms. Some of the complaints are simply ways that we express frustration and anxiety about whether the event, celebration or fundraiser that we are involved in will come off successfully. That pre-event anxiousness is pretty common.

Most, if nearly all such events do go off without a hitch, at least a visible one. Most local celebrations and fundraisers that I’ve attended or have been a part of planning and carrying out, in spite of a fair amount of hand wringing, have been quite successful.

After it is all over, and the dust has settled, and the dishes and floors are cleaned up again, we often hear a different viewpoint expressed by volunteers who were working. They express a sense of pride and satisfaction that comes from a job well done. They are elated that the pressure is off and the mission has been accomplished. The complaints and misgivings are long forgotten and the real joy and personal rewards of knowing that a person did their best, overcome any of the earlier worries.

We often hear volunteers talk about how much fun it was to work with other volunteers, even those folks they maybe didn’t even know before the event started. Lasting friendships sometimes begin from these volunteer efforts. We get to meet new people and work with old friends alike to accomplish a single goal.

Working together as a community is a rewarding process. We have to hand it to the folks who came before us, who didn’t have the leisure time many of us have today, but still pulled together to prepare wonderful church dinners and bazaars, huge parades and significant community celebrations.

If you know the story of the North Platte Canteen, where volunteers came from hundreds of small towns around Nebraska to prepare and serve meals and a little hometown friendliness to literally hundreds of thousands of soldiers who passed through the train station there on their way to or on their way home from World War II. It is an incredible story of volunteerism, of people who didn’t know each other, but who worked together, even in very difficult times, for the common good of soldiers they didn’t know either.

To think that these volunteer efforts are played out again each time we have a church, school or community event, is pretty heartening these days. That volunteer attitude is certainly part of the reason our communities survive in good times and in bad.

Hope you have a good week.