Only those who do volunteer work of handing out food baskets to those in need, realize the extent of sensitivity required for this kind of job. A volunteer who participates in handing out baskets must constantly remember that they not only give food in order to fill empty stomachs. First of all they are giving attention, empathy and care.
The emphasis the center’s volunteers put before giving someone the first food basket is to give a good feeling.
A good feeling can be given through a smile, a kind word, showing interest, and these of course are given by the center’s volunteers generously. But first of all, even if this may sound strange, the volunteer gives respect to everyone, whoever they are. And this does not go without saying, to respect a person regardless of their situation and the conditions of their life.
It is very easy to respect and value a person who has reached material and professional achievements, and it is very easy to feel disrespect towards a person who has not achieved impressive goals in his or her lifetime, or has lost what they had due to incorrect considerations. It is very easy to be jealous of a person who has enjoyed good fortune and luck, and very easy to feel pity for one who has not been lucky, who has been victim of a cruel fate. But none of the people who ask for help deserve to be disrespected by someone else due to their life circumstances, and none of them need anyone else’s pity.
A volunteer must forget that they are standing opposite a person who is “in need”, “needy” or “poor”, and they must constantly remember that they are standing opposite a person just like them, with a past full of disappointments and mistakes just like theirs, with tendencies and qualifications, some have been realized and some have not been developed, just like them. And they all have basic needs and desires for a bit of joy and happiness, just like each and every volunteer does.
The volunteers must remember that this person asking them for help dealt with life using the only tools they had, they made efforts to succeed in life with the abilities they had, and they did exactly what they knew how to do, just like them. The respect they deserve right now is for the choices they made and for the consequences of these choices, which they are dealing with right now.
Words are not necessary, nor the touch of hands or to be stimulated to talk in order to give them a good feeling. The volunteer only needs to think about them just as they would have wanted to be thought of had they been in the same situation. And then only to enable this message to move along the unseen route of messages transferred directly from one heart to another, and the message will be delivered.