Why then was it called an appreciation dinner, if not to thank and appreciate those who have been searching for Hailey? I wouldn't expect anything either, but had I been invited to the appreciation dinner, I wouldn't expect this kind of response from the mother of a missing child.
Still don't get why she said "they think SA did something horrible to SA" -- where the heck did she get that from....at an appreciation dinner?
MOO
Mel
I may be way out of line... but if there was an appreciation dinner for local firefighters, held by their community, would it be appropriate to show footage of people's homes burning who might be in attendance at the event, or would that be insensitive? Would you show gory car wrecks at an EMT appreciation dinner? I think that, to Billie, this was similar.
I have been trying to keep this next bit to myself, as I am sure most everyone is sick of my long posts about my own experiences, and how I feel they relate to the subject at hand. But it really DOES seem relevant to me...
A while ago (more than a dozen years) I was the organizer of a local chapter of a national charity called Project Linus. The purpose of the group was to provide child-size handmade blankets to children experiencing trauma.
I made a lot of quilts myself, especially in the beginning. I did all the publicity, recruited volunteers and solicited donations of fabric for quilting and yarn for knitting and crocheting, to be provided to those who volunteered to produce the blankets when it got to the point that I could no longer provide the materials myself. More often than not, despite my specifications that only certain types of fabric were useful, and clarifying this by phone, I'd drive miles to pick up donated fabric only to find that someone was basically cleaning out their closets and expected me to haul away and pick through boxes or bags of completely inappropriate items to find one or two use, then had to find another charity that could use what we could not. Regardless of my disappointment when I collected donations like that, I always expressed my gratitude and never told them that what they were giving was "worthless" to me.
I arranged quilting parties at my church, where we set up stations to cut fabric, sew, and finish quilts in an "assembly line" fashion. We cut fabric for "kits" to provide to volunteers to take home, and taught a troop of scouts to make a quilt and to crochet. To be honest, some of the quilts made by a senior center were made with such large stitches that they were falling apart when I picked them up, yet I always "oohed and aahed" no matter how humble the effort.
In the course of two years, we averaged one blanket per day processed through the system. A number of crocheted blankets were provided to a neonatal AIDS program, a few quilts went to the local fire company to be distributed as they saw fit. We got the occasional request for a single blanket for a pediatric cancer patient or something, but ultimately I connected with a local hospital that does a particular limb-lengthening procedure on children. It is not a one-time procedure, and many of the kids had to travel from around the world several times, sometimes without parents to a place they could not even speak the language for a prolonged and painful procedure. They had a steady need for blankets, and the kids getting them seemed unbelievably happy to get them. For many it meant they could now go to the activity room in a wheelchair with the blanket over their laps, as they often could not put pants on while the halo appliance was on their leg. They were always given a choice of several so they felt they'd been able to choose their own.
I was fortunate to be contacted by a local quilting group at about the same time I began taking quilts to this hospital. Quilts were preferable to "yarn" blankets for these patients, as they did not catch on the pins that secured the device to the child's bone, and these ladies seemed willing and able to produce quilts in huge quantities, as long as the supplies were provided. I went to the group's monthly meeting, encouraged them, admired their efforts, delivered materials, and picked up finished quilts. It was working really well until the president of that group demanded accountability for every quilt they made. Since I was delivering them to my liaison at the hospital at the rate of about 50 every 6 weeks, I was distributing only a few myself on the drop off day, and she handled the rest of the patients. I had no doubt they were being given to the kids, as I often met kids on a visit who had received their blanket prior to my arrival, and some of them brought them back with them for subsequent surgeries.
In short, providing information about the chain of custody of each blanket, at the rate we were going, was all but impossible. I did the only thing I could think of. I took a photo of each quilt on my clothesline and had two copies printed. One I put in an album, the other I turned into a postcard with a fill-in-the-blank format saying "My name is _____ and I am __ years old. I received the blanket depicted on this postcard from Project Linus and wanted to thank you for making it."
I paid for all this out of pocket, and provided a stamp for each one myself. With each delivery, I stacked the blankets neatly in the back of my station wagon and took photos of them. I photographed them again in the red wagon we used to transport them from the car to the ward, and of the liaison in her scrubs accepting them, but never photographed the pediatric patients actually getting them. I safety pinned the postcards to the corresponding quilts and my liaison made every effort to get the parents to take a minute to fill it out, but they had way bigger worries, with their child in the hospital, missing time from work, and possibly not even fluent in English, so I got back only about 95% of the postcards (I made these cards only for this group, as nobody else required it), which I placed behind the first photo in the album. Flipping through the books, my quilters could see who had picked which blanket, and feel their effort was appreciated.
After a year of a fairly good relationship with them, their president became preoccupied with the 5% of quilts they were NOT getting postcards back for. I had no control over the parents filling out the cards, and could only ask that they do so. I thought 95% was pretty good, and would never have been achieved if I had not done so much of the work for them that they literally only had to write "Brianna" and "6" on the card and hand it to a nurse to mail. I explained that I was doing my best, but it came down to her accusing me of misappropriating their blankets to some other purpose.
If I had had ANY desire to steal donated quilts, there were other donors who would never have been the wiser. There was no logic behind her accusations, and certainly no truth. I'd been busting my butt to get the pictures taken and developed, converted into postcards, attached to the blankets and delivered with postage affixed so that they would feel "appreciated" for what I'd thought they were doing voluntarily because it made them feel good to do so. That's why I was doing it, why I continued to dig deep into my own pockets to keep the project afloat, and why I took the "abuse" of people foisting off their junk on me and pretending they did not know better, and why I spent much of my time at a sewing machine, or speaking to groups.
I didn't put postcards on the quilts I made, or those by any of the other dozen or so regular donors. And, as I said, nobody else expected a "thank you" from the child receiving the quilt/blanket they made, including the Girl Scouts, so I have to believe they were being unreasonable to expect it, but they ultimately withdrew their support, on the presumption that I had somehow "conned" them.
I never expected any pats on the back. I deflected any praise, as much of the work was being done by others, and I could not take credit for it. But these ladies, many of whom I realize may not have felt as adamantly about this as their president, were so high-maintenance, and their demand for appropriate recognition so unrelenting that I eventually stopped my work for Project Linus altogether because I was offended by constantly being treated like a thief by this one person.
That's my $0.02 on volunteers and appreciation. I definitely appreciated every stitch on every quilt made by every volunteer as it helped me ease a difficult time for children in a time of need, and always made that abundantly clear to everyone I dealt with, but it just wasn't enough. I still feel conflicted about whether they had any right to expect individual recognition for each of the 200+ quilts they made over the year we worked together. When I make a donation, I make it to a group I TRUST to use it appropriately, and don't require specific accountability for its ultimate use.
This is kind of off topic, isn't it?