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| Samaritans are always on hand (from their homepage) |
Some years ago I decided to work in the commercial world and became a tourist guide. Several members of my family worked in public service but, possibly influenced by the early days of Thatcherism, I felt that I should get out into the private sector and make a living based on people paying for my services. So I became a tourist guide (surprisingly lucrative once I found a niche) and a writer (forget about it, financially at least).
Tourism died with the outbreak of the corona virus and I have not had a single paid job this year. So I decided to forget about earning money and take an unpaid sabbatical for a year. Fortunately, I had enough in the bank to be able to do this without too much pain. However, although money Is not a problem now, boredom can strike if I do not have enough to keep me occupied.
I decided to volunteer to become a Samaritan and am now undergoing their training. It is an idea I have contemplated before and have supported the organisation financially for many years. Samaritans was founded by a vicar called Chad Varah in 1953, the year I was born. He originally took all the calls himself but realised that he would need volunteers and they arrived year. There are now 20,000 of them.
While you have to be able to talk to be an effective tourist guide – and it certainly helps if you like the sound of your own voice – you need to be able to listen if you are to be a Samaritan. We are trained to be non-judgemental and ‘empathetic’ rather than ‘sympathetic’. This may seems odd but it means that you are willing to share with people as an equal rather than to look down on them from above.
The training involves various exercises and I realise that my problem solving mindset is actually not what is wanted by Samaritans. One pretend caller asks the trainee help her solve a problem with questions like “Can you do this for me?” or “What should I do?” The answers, frankly, are “No” and “Talk to me about it?” This goes against the grain for me as, presented with a problem, my instinct is to try to solve it.
But that is not what Chad Varah intended when he founded Samaritans. The object of the exercise was – and is – to listen not to talk. It is an opportunity for people on their own to talk to someone who will listen to them without judgement. There are opportunities to give practical help but these come through third parties who have the kind of expertise an ordinary person acting as a Samaritan might not possess.
This ‘ordinary’ person does not need to have any professional qualifications or skills, just the ability to listen to what the caller is talking about. In a fast-moving status-driven society, people often do not have the opportunity to simply talk frankly about what is troubling them to friends and family, worried that they will seem weak or foolish and that well-meaning advice is often unhelpful and even counter-productive.
People tend to think of Samaritans as being ‘the suicide service’, helping to talk people out of ending their lives, there as a last resort for those who cannot cope. Certainly, there is an element of suicide prevention in what the volunteers do, but I was somewhat surprised to find that a Samaritan should always respect a person’s right to end their own life and not always to feel it is their role to prevent it.
If someone decides to end their life that is their decision. To be a good Samaritan (in the non-biblical sense) you need to be able to put your own feelings to one side and to let people express theirs. This may well result in them feeling better about their situation and finding a reason to carry on but, if it does not, that does not necessarily means that the Samaritan has failed, just that the caller has made their own decision.
Although Samaritans was founded by a priest, it is a non-religious organisation. Not many people go to church regularly these days and even fewer see the priest as someone they talk to regularly, certainly not for the purposes of confession, which at least gets things off your mind. Thus, Samaritans act as a sort of priest-substitute.
For this they get paid nothing. Anyone who takes on the role does so voluntarily and only a few largely technical staff are paid by the organisation, which relies on support from donations plus a few gifts from the National Lottery and the government. Samaritans pulls in nearly £20 million a year but none of the volunteers are paid a penny.
This is how it should be. No-one who becomes a Samaritan should aim to take money from the organisation. They should, however, be prepared to offer time to it. As the organisation never closes, this might mean being available during the night or the working day, so many volunteers are retired from active work, which seems to include me. Never mind: I have made my money. Now it is time to give back some of my time. Plenty of that at the moment.
Edwin Lerner
My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com
To contact the Samaritans, telephone 116 123 (free) or email: jo@samaritans.org
To find out more about or donate to the Samaritans go to: samaritans.org
