In Praise of Volunteer Work
~ On Your Mind with Yvonne Zipter ~
A few months ago, I was at a dinner party celebrating the high school graduation of a friend’s daughter. I was seated across the table from a former coworker of my wife’s. The woman was complaining about how much she hated retirement, about how bored she was.
I was stunned. How could she not love retirement? Since I stopped working full time, I have been having a blast. For the first time ever, I could devote myself to writing. In the five years since retiring, I’d had two poetry collections, a novel, and dozens of poems published. I know I’m lucky, in that not everyone has a great passion they’ve been waiting to pursue. So when this woman asked me what it is I like about retirement and what I’ve been doing with myself, I didn’t mention the writing but, instead, I talked about how much joy volunteering has given me.
After I retired in 2018, it took me a couple of years to find a volunteer gig that excited me. Urban Rivers was right up my alley. Urban Rivers’s mission is to “transform city rivers into Urban Wildlife Sanctuaries.” They are doing this by building floating islands for waterfowl and other animals since much of the river has steep walls of concrete or steel, providing no shore for animals to use. Urban Rivers also collects garbage found floating in the river to help monitor what gets found where. In addition, they conduct scientific studies to figure how best to get the river healthy again. Volunteers help with all of this.
It was unnerving to step off the pier into a kayak on the opaque river, given how polluted it is yet, with E. coli just one of the dangers of a dunk in that water. But once safely in the kayak, my time was magical, with great blue herons, scaups, cormorants, and turtles on downed branches, piers, and the occasional sandbar. Magical, that is, except for all the garbage floating in the water. Using a grabber, I pulled fast food containers, beer cans, liquor bottles, vape pens, candy wrappers, and used condoms out of the river. Once, what I thought was a balloon turned out to be a badly bloated rat. I did not attempt to retrieve it.
But then the pandemic came, and the work on the river stopped for a while. During that time, I was diagnosed with cancer, had surgery, and started chemo. While I loved my time on the river, I decided that carting the heavy kayak down a long staircase to the pier and the river was just too much for me to manage.
A year or so later, I chanced upon a call for volunteers at Lincoln Park Zoo in the areas of horticulture (the zoo is an accredited arboretum), guest engagement, and something called ZooMonitor. From the description of the latter volunteer position, I learned that “ZooMonitor volunteers observe the behavior of zoo animals and record data using [the] ZooMonitor [app], which allows Animal Care staff to provide high-quality animal care, welfare, and management. Volunteers in this role must have a strong interest in animals and conservation and a keen attention to detail.” I was immediately interested! I have always loved animals and, when I was still working as an editor at the University of Chicago Press, I often worked on books about animals and conservation. Attention to detail? I’m a poet: attention to detail is essential. And editing, of course, is all about focusing on small particulars.
But becoming a ZooMonitor is not something you can just decide to do. There’s an interview, five weeks of training, and an accuracy test you need to pass at the end of training. Competition even to get a spot in training is daunting.
I’ve been a ZooMonitor for more than a year now, and it’s been one of the greatest experiences of my life. Once a week, using the app created by Lincoln Park Zoo, I observe the behaviors of African lions, black bears, Canada lynx, snow leopards, and several kinds of monkeys. Over time, I’ve gotten to know the animals’ personalities and habits. I know each of their names and feel a fondness for every one of them. Simply getting to spend time watching each of these uniquely interesting creatures would be reward enough. But knowing that the information I’m collecting helps the animal care staff not only to provide the healthiest and happiest life possible for the animals but also contributes to conservation efforts of endangered species makes this job even more incredibly gratifying.
That I love the animals is not a surprise. But what did surprise me a bit was how wonderful the people are. From zoo staff members to other volunteers, the people I’ve met while volunteering are warm, funny, and dedicated. Yes, I am giving my time, but I feel like I’m getting so much more in return. I quickly bonded with one of the volunteers with whom I trained. And when my cancer returned this year, the staff couldn’t have been more supportive, making it clear that I should take whatever time I needed as I went through treatment and that I should let them know if there were ways they could aid me on the days I was there. Even zoo guests, for the most part, are appreciative of the information I can pass on to them, from where an animal is “hiding” in their enclosure to species-specific facts.
What’s on my mind? All too often these days, it’s cancer and chemotherapy and the drugs’ side effects. But when I’m at the zoo, cancer is far from my mind. Watching Birch the black bear sleeping under a tree, or Tiko the DeBrazza’s monkey leaping from branch to branch, or seven-month-old lion cubs Pesho, Sidai, and Lomelok romp with each other, I enter a kind of zen state where nothing exists for me but this moment in time with whatever animal I’m observing.
There are so many ways one can make a difference in the world by giving even just a little of one’s time, and surely there must be as many volunteer opportunities as there are kinds of people in the world. Bored? Not me.
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Yvonne Zipter is the author of the poetry collections The Wordless Lullaby of Crickets, Kissing the Long Face of the Greyhound, The Patience of Metal, and Like Some Bookie God. Her published poems are currently being sold individually in Chicago in two repurposed toy-vending machines, the proceeds of which are donated to the nonprofit arts organization Arts Alive Chicago. She is also the author of the nonfiction books Diamonds Are a Dyke’s Best Friend and Ransacking the Closet and the Russian historical novel Infraction. She is retired from the University of Chicago Press, where she was a manuscript editor.