I was
reading Chasing Chaos: My Decade In And
Out of Humanitarian Aid, by Jessica Alexander, the other day. She lived and worked in some of the places
you hear about on the news: Rwanda,
Darfur, Sri Lanka, Sierra Leone, Haiti, New York City… (Yes, New York City is its own country – just
ask anyone from western New York). In
her book, Ms. Alexander was sorting out her feelings about her humanitarian aid
career compared to what she knew from the statistics and actually observed in
the field. Sometimes they don’t all
jive. Sometimes the big picture gets
lost in the day-to-day, and sometimes it is the other way around.
The humanitarian aid industry usually comes
into the picture after a crisis: hurricane,
war, tsunami, or earthquake. The people
doing the humanitarian aid have their own way of doing things which is almost
never the way the locals did it themselves, be it housing, nutrition,
infrastructure or health care. By
definition, humanitarian aid is a disruption in the re-establishment of the
local economy. If you give things away,
the local vendors can’t compete. If you
hire people to do things (so they can buy things from the local vendors), those
jobs you created will disappear when you leave. That is if you CAN leave, because sometimes
the crisis created by the departure of the aid industry can be almost as
traumatic as the crisis that brought them there in the first place. There are always trade-offs.
In long term
care, we have the parallel issue of sorting out our feelings, understanding and
observations about what we do as activity professionals. Someone ends up in assisted living or a
nursing home as a result of a crisis. It
may have come on gradually, but that individual can no longer deal with life on
their own. Our long-term care facilities
and communities have their own ways of doing things, which no matter how
“home-like” we try to make them, are still different than what the residents
were used to. They go from a private home
or apartment to some level of group setting.
Solitary or family meals become group dining. Instead of running their own lives, there are
administrators, financial officers, social workers, housekeepers, maintenance
staff, and care providers who must now be dealt with. And don’t forget wheelchairs and bed alarms,
schedules and strange roommates.
Now,
don’t get me wrong. A lot of families
spend a lot of money for the privilege of sending their offspring to experience
college dormitory life – which, other than the health part, is not so different
than long-term care. But a college
student will eventually, we hope, emerge from the dormitory to re-engage in
what we call the “normal” life. For
most seniors, leaving assisted living or the nursing home without major home
care assistance is the prescription for a new crisis: falls, fire, self-neglect,
malnutrition. There are always
trade-offs.
The activity
professional is in a strategic place in both the big picture and the
day-to-day. We are the ones who are
charged with knowing our residents individually and figuring out how to make it
possible for each of them to enjoy the highest quality of life possible under
the circumstances. We plan day-to-day,
but we also look at the long-term patterns.
When one approach doesn’t work, we look for something else. Ideas are our currency. Some we come up with on our own, but others
come from the residents themselves, the residents who are creating their own
new economy.
© Donna Stuart, February 13, 2014*
Alexander,
Jessica. Chasing Chaos: My Decade In And Out of Humanitarian Aid. New
York: Broadway Books, 2013.
This article first appeared on the Metrolina Activity Professionals Association Facebook page on 2/13/2014.
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