99-Year-Old Volunteers – Still Going Strong

“Mary Guglielmo was born on May 11, 1917, in New York City. Mary Alsing was born 16 days later in Ontario, Canada. Their lives began far apart and took different paths, but decades ago they both wound up in the same place: as members of the volunteer corps at Johnson Memorial Hospital.”

That’s the opening paragraph of a story in The Hartford Courant highlighting the service of two women who have been volunteering at a rural hospital not too far from my house.

When I started looking for stories to share as part of WATWB, this one caught my attention. I know that hospital. I drive by it often. I’ve been to the Emergency Room of this hospital several times. If you read the story, you will read about how important the hospital’s volunteers are to its continuing operations.

Volunteering sounds vague. It’s hard to understand and it’s often hard to explain. If you volunteer for anything and people ask you what that means, you might fall back on giving examples. Maybe it’s helping out at church, maybe serving meals in town, maybe visiting schools to add some real-world experience to a textbook view of life.

Notice that “giving money” isn’t in that list.

We all have various amounts of money. The amount we have changes during our life. But we all, always have the same amount of time. What you do with your time says a lot about who you are. Maybe you listen to someone who needs to talk. Maybe you serve food, read to children, stop and give directions, hold a door or help someone with housework. Maybe you sign-up and serve scheduled hours at a hospital, like Mary and Mary.

“Guglielmo, who lives in Stafford, has logged more than 24,000 volunteer hours, a record at the hospital. Alsing, who lives in Somers, is the longest-serving volunteer, having served at Johnson for 40 years.”

I’ll close by thanking the volunteers who are co-hosting this blogfest. Co-hosting takes time. I didn’t have enough time to help at that level, but I agreed to write a post, to join the group and spread the word. I’m glad I did. It caused me to pay attention to Marys’ story and that made me feel better.

I’ll see you again on April 28^th.

This post is part of the We Are The World Blogfest

The #WATWB was inspired by a simple conversation about how all the negativity on social media was weighing on us. Wanting to make a difference we decided to try to do our part to infuse social media with all the good stories that are out there, the stories that show kindness, compassion, hope and the resilience of the human spirit. With your help, we hope to change the current landscape of social media, blogs, and news.