Since Deanna, our American volunteer who was with us for six weeks to assist with, among other things, improving the Fundacion Ruach Facebook page, we’ve been struggling to maintain the impetus she had created.
Unfortunately no Ruach staff could step into Dianne’s shoes. We also tried to have a member of the Ruach Board take up this responsibility for the Facebook page, but that did not work out. Then we had volunteer Ana who had just finished a photography course and was enthusiastic to combine her newly learned skills with Facebook, but in spite of her initial enthusiasm, her efforts petered out. Weeks later I met Ismael: I came home full of hope after our first meeting, but a follow-up meeting three weeks later only served the purpose of keeping the illusion going that we had made progress.
Bingo?
It was really disheartening. But then I got in touch with Ronald. He also was enthusiastic and he had 101 ideas how to bring our Facebook page to the attention of a wider public. Sceptically I said to myself: I would be so happy if he would just be taking care of regularly updating the existing page … My scepticism was proved wrong. Please have a look at our facebookpage and you will see he did much better than hoped for. (Any positive feedback is very welcome! 🙂 )
The battle for finding a qualified home care assistant
Making progress often is a tedious process. Another example is finding people who can run night shifts in our Home. Mayela and myself are the permanent living-in residents, but during our times off-work, we need people to take over from us, as we must at all times (day and night) have two staff in the home to be able to deal with unexpected urgent situations. We now have four residents with an intellectual disability so having two members of staff is below the minimum requirement. For quite some time we have been relying on Luz Milda who is on the Ruach Board and who lives nearby to fill in some gaps.
Our search for a part-time (stand-in) home care assistant has taken many weeks. At one point we were very pleased when we found doña Paulina, quite by chance, who seemed very capable. But she was also caring for her aging father. Although she enjoyed the two times she did a night shift, her father claimed her full-time attention which left her with little choice but to drop her involvement with our Home.
Out of the blue…
Suitable candidates for work with our residents in the Home are hard to find. So to our very big relief and surprise we found ourselves in a situation that we had a choice out of TWO seemingly suitable candidates. We opted to play safe by giving both women a chance. From this week onwards we are optimally covered for the night shifts by alternating between the two candidates. We hope that both of them will live up to our expectations, will get through the trial period and provide the peace we all crave for!