Find your volunteer passion

Linda was ironing shirts one day when she turned on the TV to a station she doesn’t usually watch and happened upon a documentary about the Oglala-Lakota nation. She was so moved that she contacted an organization, Re-member, that supports the Oglala-Lakota nation of Pine Ridge, South Dakota. Recently retired from the IMF after 27 years, she signed up to volunteer for a week with Re-member on the reservation. Her husband thought she was crazy: “you’re going to the middle of the country, to work with someone you don’t know, cross the Badlands for an hour in an older car, with little cell reception – what?!”For a week in 2016, Linda built ramps for people in wheelchairs (many have diabetes, she explained); assembled bunk beds for the kids (some had been sleeping on floors); fitted skirts around the trailers (it’s freezing!). She couldn’t talk about the situation without tears, its not right that this Nation should live like this, she said. “I’m going to do something,” she said when she got back home, “I have to.” She started with a coat drive; it grew to include socks, sweaters, diapers, toiletries, and other essential items. I asked Linda why she decided to focus on this project. When she was 12 years old, her dad took her and her siblings on a road trip – to visit the tomb of Geronimo in Fort Sill, Oklahoma; he wanted them to know about their country’s history and the plight of Indians. That experience left a lasting memory. As did a colorful painting of a dancing Indian by CE Rowell, which hung in her grandparents’ home, ‘in the bright Paris sunlight’, for 50 years. Last year when they sold that apartment, it’s the one thing that Linda wanted to keep; it now hangs in her bedroom, the colors just as bright. She discovered that her father had bought that painting on the road trip to Oklahoma when Linda was twelve.