Yesterday I was trying to explain to a group of young people what the point of voluntary work is. It can be a shocking concept to some people the idea of working without getting paid. Don't get me wrong, I like money as much as the next person, but sometimes it's just not a good enough reason to do things.
I gave up paid work last year, so that I could move back to Leeds. Mostly this was so I could be some support to my mum, who'd been seriously ill for the last year or so. Unfortunately, she died in November, and she doesn't need my help any more. So I thought I'd better find some people who do....
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| Catching Lambs - easy once you know how |
For the last 6 months or so I've been volunteering in Leeds at a charity called St Vincent's Support Centre. They do lots of things to support people, but one of the main things they do is provide free English classes to speakers of other languages. And that's the area that I help with. I've always loved language and English in particular, so I thought I might like to try and explain what I like about it to other people.
Because I'm sort of an expert in English, what with being a native speaker and all, I thought I'd be really good at this type of work, but what I didn't realise is how hard it can be to pass my knowledge on, especially to people with very little English.
The people I meet are from all over the world. Some are asylum seekers and refugees, some are here for other reasons. Some are recent arrivals, and some have been here for ages. I often ask them how long they've been here, but I don't ask them why they came. It's none of my business, and there's always the possibility it's not a very happy reason. Thankfully I don't work border patrol so I didn't have to decide whether they could come in or not, but now they're in, I just try to make them feel welcome in my home town.
I haven't got the space or the time to write here about all the brilliant people I've met since I started volunteering, but one thing I figured out is that they're saving me a fortune in travelling expenses and airfares. I've never been to Eritrea, or Sudan, or Syria, or Kurdistan, or Hungary, of the Czech Republic, or Congo, or Cameroon, or Poland, or Argentina, or Brazil or Morocco, or Portugal but I've managed to get a snapshot of what all those countries' people are like, by having them come to me. I hate airports anyway, all that queuing up in funnels to be strip searched and not being able to carry liquids, and my favourite TV programme is Air Crash Investigation so probably as well I don't fly much.
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| Matt and Julie - the real stars of the show |
What's all this got to do with Sheep Farming, you may ask? Well, one of the perks of being a volunteer is that I sometimes get invited along on away-days that are organised by the Centre. In March we went on a guided tour of Malham Cove, and last week I went on a lambing trip to a farm near Horton-in-Ribblesdale. The trips are organised by Matt and Julie, two managers from the Centre, and it's a privilege to be able to go on them, as well as being great fun. They're organised in partnership with Judy, a lady who works for another brilliant organisation called People and the Dales. The farmer we met was called Rodney, and he was our guide and inspiration for the day. Instead of just telling us stuff, he gave us a much more hands-on role, by taking us out into the fields and getting us to round up and catch some lambs.
This was so that they could be tagged with an electronic tag in their ears, and have their tails docked, and then they got painted green (just a bit), and got castrated if they were boys. This sounds pretty nasty but it just seemed to involve having a small elastic band put round their newly born testicles, so that in a couple of weeks they'll just drop off. No knives were involved. Some of the lambs looked a bit stressed for a few minutes after having this done, but there seemed to be no lasting damage (if you don't include the lack of future testicles).
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| I was easily able to outsmart this newborn lamb - I just used my massive human brain. |
Lambs are actually pretty easy to catch, especially if they're in a pen that they can't get out of, and if there's a few of you. I've never caught any before, but I have caught pigeons before in shops I've worked in (that's another story) and I've picked my dog up before and put him in the bath. Also, I used to play in goals, and although I'm not as good at bending down as I used to be, I do have some basic handling skills.
The first thing to mention about Rodney was his Jedi-like calmness. He was the epitome of leading by doing things and being really good at stuff, rather than speaking. Also, he noticed everything. One of his greatest assets was the much underrated skill of just paying attention. He was aware of individual sheep and he noticed whether the new lambs were getting milk or not, or if any of them were not being cared for by their mums, and any that were looking like they needed a bit of extra care were brought inside so he could keep a closer eye on them.
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| As far as times and places to be born go, this takes some beating.... |
At first I didn't understand why he was Baa-ing at them, but when one answered that had fallen down a ditch, and then when a mother went to look for her lamb because he told her to, I started to get it. He was so in tune with the work he was doing, and so expert at it without being a show-off, there's a lesson there for all of us.
I thought in advance that a trip to a sheep farm might put me off eating meat, seeing lambs been born, and knowing that in a few months they'd be slaughtered for food, but it didn't. Maybe it was because of the care with which they were being treated, and I reflected that even if it's a short life, it's still a good life out there in the Dales. If I had to be born as a sheep, there are worse places for it to happen. All of us have comparatively short lifespans in any case, that we don't know the when and the where of the ending of, so we're not all that different from sheep anyway.
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| Here's me trying to impersonate a sheep farmer |
The weather certainly helped, in that it was a beautiful day, and we saw the Dales at their best, but the highlight for me had to be delivering a lamb, at the end of the day, just before we got back in the bus. Rodney offered to let one of us pull the lamb out of its mother, and no-one else volunteered, and I thought 'Why not?, I may never get the chance again'. It didn't actually need all that much pulling, because it was pretty slimy and it came out easily. I found I didn't mind the slime, because I was on a high just from being there at a new birth, and when the new lamb tried to walk after only a couple of minutes I really wanted it to succeed, as if it really was my own child, but then like other real-life fathers who've done the easy bit, I went off in a minibus and let the mum get on with bringing it up.
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| Here's a lamb I made earlier - to be fair the mother and Rodney did most of the work |
I think that 'high' has lasted all week, and for a whole week I've told anyone who'll listen about how I delivered a baby lamb.
Sometimes I feel completely clueless in the classroom when I'm trying to help people learn English (I hesitate to use the term teacher, since I'm not trained as one yet), but I have to remember that Rodney didn't become a Jedi overnight. He's been sheep farming all his life, it's second nature to him now. Sometimes I think I'm getting absolutely nowhere in my English classes, especially when I do things like trying to explain English humour to a class of 17 beginners by trying to tell jokes (they were a tough crowd, silence, tumbleweed etc etc) but I figure that currently, despite my regular uselessness, I occasionally touch on absolute brilliance.
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| Julie and Brenda standing a really long way in front of the tiny Ribblehead Viaduct. I often amaze Brenda in the class we teach together with the amount of rubbish I can speak in perfect English.... |
It's only for the briefest of moments, maybe less than 5% of the time, but I hope one day to be brilliant for at least 15% of the time, so I intend to keep going. A lot of the time in class I feel about as composed as one of those small newborn lambs, who's just been elastic banded, but on the odd occasion when I think I've truly connected with a stranger from a strange land and communicated something worthwhile about my native language, I feel amazing. And the high I feel then is similar to the high I felt when that lamb popped out last week. I forget about myself, and all my petty worries and problems, and in that moment I know what I'm here for.
And so that's the point of voluntary work I think. Not only are you doing something useful to help others, but sometimes alongside the thing that you're volunteering at, you get other opportunities, and really amazing and accidental things can happen, which make you feel really, really good, and you realise that you're a part of something special.
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