Nurse Nicky Nears Her Peak of Fitness

 

There are different ways of training to climb Kilimanjaro, Africa's highest mountain.

Nurse Nicky Bennen-Rees has been walking across London every day from her flat to Great Ormond Street Hospital. Then, once her night-shift nursing sick children is over, she runs the five and half miles back home. Every weekend for the past two months she has been jogging in the park and playing her favourite sport, tennis. “I’ve even changed my diet,” she explained. “Now it’s steak, eggs and as much fresh fruit as I can eat.”

Climb for money. What’s it all for? Nicky is taking part in a sponsored climb at the beginning of September to raise money for an extension to the children's ward at her hospital. She and nine others will spend five days climbing up and down Kilimanjaro's 19 340 feet. This is a final attempt to raise the £250 000 they need to build accommodation for the families of children desperately ill in hospital. They have been trying to raise the money for five years and have so far collected nearly £200 000.

Separated. Nurse Nicky knows just how valuable it can be for children to have their parents near at such times. She has seen how parents of sick children are separated from the rest of their families, and then have to sleep on waiting-room floors.

 “It’s great to be able to do something like this and at the same time make money for a worthwhile cause,” she added.

All the members of the climb have something in common. They have all had major surgery at some time in their lives, but there are no doubts about their fitness. They have all been training under Terry Alien, a football coach.

Donations. Such a trip needs a lot of organization and funding, and help has come from many quarters. Special winter clothing will be needed on the snow-covered summit, and local shops have provided this, and also climbing boots, sleeping bags, and water bottles. The Dutch air-line KLM has donated five of the air tickets to Tanzania free of charge.

Since this newspaper announced the climb two weeks ago, readers have sent in scores of coupons like the one below. But more support is needed. Now is your chance to sponsor a worthy cause, so fill the coupon in now.

 

I wish to sponsor the Sick Children’s Trust Kilimanjaro Project team £.... per... 1000 ft.

Total ......................…………..

Signature ……………………..

Name …………………………

Address ……………………….

Phone No. …………………….

SEND to Dr. John Prichard. The Sick Children's Trust Home from Home. 139Gray’s Inn Road, London WCIX 8ur.

 

 

USA : Warrior Bucks in the Concrete Jungle

 

As early as 5 a.m., traffic begins snaking its way from the suburbs into downtown Washington, DC. By 7 a.m., radio announcers are already reporting traffic build-ups miles long and by 8 a.m., the city swarms with high-powered executives gulping breakfast on the go as they scurry to their offices.

In a city where power is essential and who you know is more important than what you know, it's easy to believe that few people care about the vast social problems. Yet tap into a very different kind of network, the world of volunteers, and the city begins to look human.

The Points of Light Foundation, head­quartered in Washington, DC, was founded in 1990 to promote volunteerism. But its mission statement goes much deeper, to “bringing people together... to combat the disconnection and alienation that lie at the core of our nation s most serious social problems.” The Foundation launched an initiative called Connect America to inspire 10 million people to commit to connect through volunteering.

Volunteerism itself is nothing new. Community service and volunteering have long been firm traditions in the USA. A 1995 survey conducted by the Gallup International Institute and the Points of Light Foundation estimated that
93 million people volunteered that year, giving an average of 4,2 hours per week with a total value of $201 billion. And more than 36 per cent of American households volunteer as families.

According to the Points of Light Foundation volunteering in the US is shifting its focus towards serious social problems. In a 1994 Gallup study, 85 per cent of those volunteering were doing work on one or more serious social problems, with 74 per cent of those individuals working directly with the people in need.

The US government is increasingly recognizing the potential of volunteers. In January 1997, while .announcing April's three-day President's Summit on America's Future, President Clinton asserted, The solution to the challenges facing young people must be the American people through voluntary service to 'others'. Former President George Bush agreed that it is about getting more people off the sidelines... about citizens pulling together, leading by example and lifting lives.

The impact of volunteers on serious social problems, such as youth violence, goes beyond the idealistic phrases that leaders quote. Robert K Goodwin, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Points of Light Foundation, wrote in NonProfit Times last year that in a study of Big Brothers Big Sisters (a programme providing children with adult mentors) the most notable results are the deterrent effect on initiation of drug and alcohol use, and the overall positive effects on academic performance that the mentoring produced. He also cited a 1993 study by the Search Institute which found that sixth to twelfth graders who were involved in service for one hour or more each week were about half as likely to be involved in negative behaviour as their peers.

In the US there is a strong emphasis on corporate volunteering… Amidst the concrete jungle, corporations contribute a surprising amount. According to a 1995 survey, 92 per cent of corporate executives encouraged their employees to become involved in community service, with 50 per cent making community service a part of their company's mission statement and acknowledging a connection between corporate volunteer programmes and profitability.

Federal Express Corporation, the world's largest transportation company, boasts 120 685 employees. In Memphis Tennessee headquarters adopted a large innercity school most of whose students came from public housing projects. Through a variety of innovative programmes (including warrior bucks which students earned through school attendance and then cashed in for prizes), attendance rose and more students enrolled in university. To encourage this kind of involvement, Fed Ex employees are eligible for eight hours of release time each month to volunteer in educational programmes.

Many companies encourage volunteering through “release time” schemes, and most have special offices that promote and organize volunteering. The
Prudential Insurance Company of America, one of the world's largest financial service institutions, involves more than 14 000 of its employees in volunteer programmes.

As Jack Sandner, Chairman of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, believes, this kind of work isn’t “merely another corporate volunteer programme; it's an innovative paradigm for XXI century corporate citizenship.”

Who Needs Morals?

Cambridge student Richard Jones, with the help of Mike Teece and Katherine Kirkham, offers some tips from the receiving end.

Moral values are the object of much distrust and thorny debate. But most people would admit that they are in some way important. Even the Youth of Today (henceforth referred to by the acronym YOT) would tend to agree, though our idea of morality may differ from that of our parents.

Oscar Wilde asserted: “Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.” H.G.Wells wrote: “Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.” These two gems highlight the one quality most commonly associated with the notion of morality since time immemorial: hypocrisy. Very rarely, it seems, do you see one without the other? Of course, we all know that this is not what true morality should be. True morality is extremely simple: “Love thy neighbour as thyself. Or, in more modern parlance, it's all about respect (man).”

The next question is, do children need to have morality passed on to them? Are human beings, and particularly YOT members, fundamentally bad, in need of the Stern Corrective Discipline of a classic education.

Or, conversely, are human beings inherently wonderful, angelic beings, corrupted only by the evils of social conditioning and bad parenting?

The answer's somewhere in between: human beings are both good and evil. A moral education should strive to bring out the good and 'redirect' the evil. (One can't use the word repress these days.)

Who should impart moral education? In the past, in our society, the Church played a leading role. This is no longer the case for the vast majority of people, so the burden is concentrated on parents and teachers. Teachers have enough on their plates already, and are often fearful of offending minority sensibilities, so the poor old parents bear the brunt. How should they approach this terrible responsibility?

Unfortunately, a Stern Moral Upbringing often has the reverse effect of the one intended. Rules, when imposed, become attractive chiefly for their potential for being broken.

Frustratingly – or amusingly – a liberal, laissez-faire approach to moral upbringing sometimes produces rebellion of a different kind. One antipodean
friend of mine, child of vaguely pink, baby-booming parents writes: “Why in my teens did I become a fanatical convert to Catholicism of the most sex-fearing, heretic-burning, old-fashioned kind? Surely this was a rather desperate contrived attempt to free myself from the almost weightless yoke of my parents’ comfortable, boomer morality?” It would seem parents can’t win.

 Or can they? experience is that moral values are more successfully imparted by example than dictat. It's been Far be it from me to provide any universal nostrums, but my said a million times, but the most important thing for a parent to do is to love their child. Love produces a response of love. And love, after all, lies in the basis of all morality.

Elders and betters should stand if not back, then at least aside, to allow the YOT to develop their own standards as a product of their own experience. These make far more sense, and are much more readily adhered to, than arbitrary injunctions from on high. To a certain extent experimentation, stupidity, even immorality are part and parcel of the age-old process of growing up. Within reason, of course.

And anyway, who says that passing on moral values is an exclusively top-down traffic? The YOT may have more to teach their 'elders and betters' than the latter would like to admit. And not just about computer games and rave culture. In many respects we outshine previous generations on moral issues – viz our concern for the environment, the gradual but steady erosion of racial, sexual and class prejudices, and our rejection of hypocrisy and sanctimoniousness.

Nonetheless, we’re not that bad really (mostly), and if passing on moral values became an issue for all the family, then we might get rid of a lot of the antagonism and angst involved.

Richard Jones. For a Change. 2001.

 

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