Volunteer Spotlight: Kathy Wooten
“I got divorced in 1995,” Kathy Wooten remembers. “I worked at two day-cares. They weren’t treating me well so I just said ‘Heck with it.’ It took me awhile to find this place. My friend works at Emanuel Hospital, and she said, ‘Kathy, why don’t you volunteer at the Marie Smith Center?’ So I did.”
Now, almost fifteen years later, Kathy has become an indispensable part of the Marie Smith Center. “I’ve really enjoyed the time I’ve spent volunteering here,” Kathy says. “The staff has created such a wonderful and caring atmosphere. It feels like a sanctuary for me.”
The Marie Smith Center is a neighborhood-based adult day center which serves seniors and people with disabilities. During a typical day at the Center, clients will eat lunch, listen to and play music, make art, and socialize, in addition to receiving therapeutic services, such as physical therapy, and help accomplishing acts of daily living, like showering, taking medication, and using the bathroom. The Center provides a stimulating, vital place that combats elder isolation, promotes independence, and helps the frail elderly remain in the community and with their families for as long as possible.
Kathy is a generation or two younger than most of the clients at the Marie Smith Center, but she’s one of their most valued volunteers. Joanne Wright, who has been coming to the Center for the last six or seven years, says, “Kathy is always willing to help.” The inimitable personality known around the Center as Miss B, says that Kathy is “a beautiful girl.” Miss B says she tries to keep up to date on Kathy’s life: “I ask her, ‘How’s your boyfriend?’”
Kathy’s responsibilities at the Center are twofold. She handles the everyday tasks like setting tables and serving drinks, but more importantly, she spends time with the clients and builds strong relationships. “There’s nothing quite like a listening ear,” Kathy says. “Sometimes I sit and give them manicures while they tell me their life stories. It’s a wonderful way to relax.
At 12:45 every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, you’ll find Kathy clearing empty cups and used napkins from the tables where the clients have recently eaten lunch. At 1 p.m., she will help organize the clients for their weekly music exercise. She kneels down next to an older woman and asks, “Do you wanna go for music?”
On Fridays, clients at the Center participate in music therapy classes, or “Music.” Two music therapists bring in drums, maracas, and other instruments and spend an hour playing songs with the clients. For this week’s St. Patrick’s Day theme, the music therapists lead the clients in several Irish and Scottish tunes. Kathy is as much a participant as the clients. At one point, she holds the hand of the woman sitting next to her as they sing “May the Road Rise to Meet You.”
According to Tiffany McKenna, Program Director of the Marie Smith Center, Kathy is a model of consistency. “She knows what to do, serve the drinks, pass out the napkins, that kind of thing, and she looks forward to it. She’s consistently on time and here.”
Kathy doesn’t like to talk about herself, but she will say this: “I get up at five. I like to have my coffee and my breakfast. I’m always on time, mostly. One time I got here at 11:30 instead of 10:30. I have back problems, see, and my back was giving me trouble.”
“I know her routine because she talks about what she’s done over the weekend, or what she did yesterday,” Tiffany says. “It’s like clockwork. ‘I got on the bus, I went to Curves. I saw my boyfriend. I went to a movie. Then I came to work here and I interacted with the same people I’ve been seeing forever.’”
This is what has made Kathy so valuable at the Center. “Having Kathy with the elderly here is really powerful because she’s so consistent and so regular and so present,” Tiffany says. “We really need people like her. She doesn’t have the pretensions and the notions that we all carry with us about older people. She’s the perfect volunteer for this environment, because she treats them equally. She sees them as her friends. They give her advice, and she listens.”
Kathy considers her volunteer work her full-time job, and even in our work-obsessed culture, Kathy has no trouble describing her occupation to friends. “They say, ‘Why do you want to work at a place like this?’ It’s a place to talk to people. That’s what I like. I like to talk to people.”
by Alex Johnson