Volunteering (part 1)

Biddulph Grange, August 2022

Since I last posted I've been volunteering at a Buddhist retreat centre. I offered them dates in September, October or November and they took me up on the September ones straight away, which was a bit sooner than I expected. After a busy weekend keeping well away from the plague-ridden UJ I arrived ready for the heatwave that was forecast.

When I arrived on Monday a retreat for Order Members that had started on Friday was in a phase of silence. Those of us working and not on the retreat were asked not to chat in public places around them, so it was a very quiet time until talking started again on Thursday afternoon. Three people I know very well were here on the retreat, including VG (whose retreat I'd supported in July), so it was lovely to see him again and catch up once the silence had ended.

I met the person in charge of volunteering, who promptly gave me two days off before I had to start work, so I wandered about feeling slight twinges of guilt when rocking up for my delicious meals after having walked about aimlessly and sat in the sunshine reading all day. My room has windows facing south-east and south-west, which I would normally welcome, but during a heatwave with little breeze it was uninhabitable between 11am and 6pm. Once I started working, however, I had very little time for sitting in my room between 11am and 6pm.

I exist in a state of limbo between the people visiting to attend a retreat and the people who live here. Both these groups have evening activities, but I am left to my own devices. On Monday evening I found my way to the local group that happens to meet in the retreat centre, and on Wednesday I joined the first session of an 'outreach' course for newcomers being held in Malvern. Otherwise I've been happy to spend time on my own in the evenings, reading and listening to books and generally recovering from the ordeal of working all day - something I'm not used to any more. I've also managed to do a bit more work for Mr MXF. It reminds me a little of my time on the kibbutz in the 1980's - the heat, and the lack of responsibility for anything except turning up for work - but with much less alcohol.

When I first asked if there was any scope for volunteering here I was asked what sort of work I might do, and I suggested office admin or kitchen, gardening if that was all there was, and please no cleaning or housekeeping. They picked the kitchen, and I was offered the option of being responsible for meals for people with food intolerances or allergies. That isn't how it has turned out, because the kitchen is operating without a permanent manager at the moment, so a variety of people are covering a few days each - there have been three different people in my first week, and each has their own approach to the job.

The first volunteer cook I worked with lives in Norfolk, is self-taught, and worked without written recipes or pre-planning (or tidying up). This was a challenge for me, being new to the kitchen and large-scale catering . He didn't know what he would be cooking until he'd had a think, didn't use recipes so couldn't be sure how much needed preparation, and without any record of what ingredients he had used it was pretty difficult to make sure that nobody ate something they weren't supposed to. I spent a lot of my time just clearing up after him.

The second cook is one of the live-in community here, went to catering college, and again didn't use printed recipes. She was much easier to work with because at least she had an idea ahead of time of what needed to be done, and made some effort to accommodate allergies and intolerances at the planning stage. The third cook also lives and works here but not usually in the kitchen, and within minutes I could relax. He put everything back in its proper place - at last I know where to find ladles and strainers and oven gloves! There were printed recipes, we decided together what people with restricted diets could and couldn't have and what I would cook for them.

Meanwhile, the Order Member retreat had ended and in its place two retreats had started - one just for the weekend for fathers, and the other for South American Spanish-speaking women, which would include five of them being ordained here. The person in charge of housekeeping realised that it would be helpful if the information provided about how to clean the kitchen after meals were provided in Spanish. However, for reasons known only to herself, she only translated some of the information, so some jobs like cleaning the hob and emptying the bins weren't done. I talked to her about it, and got no commitment from her to do anything more.

This sort of situation has always challenged me. Someone has done a bad job which affects me - what should I do? Should I accept the situation and do the jobs myself? Should I take it up with her again, or the person she reports to? Working within this context gave me an opportunity to reflect, to consult other more experienced Buddhists, and the option of trying out new ways of responding. What I actually did was to re-write the cleaning information and introduce it to the cleaning team myself, with the help of Google Translate and a bilingual retreatant. A small incident, but indicative of the ways that life can be different when working in a collaborative and supportive setting.