Volunteering Ideas for Putting Leisure Time to Work

Game 4 of the World Series was on, but that’s not what the small group in Andee Burrell’s Huntington Beach home had come to watch. Promptly at 7:30, Burrell loaded a tape into the VCR.

A truck chugged along a dirt road, headed for a remote Ugandan village to deliver vaccines to a hospital. A doctor hailed the vaccines but noted that some villagers feared that the medicine somehow involved birth control. Others were wary of the vaccines because they assumed that if their child didn’t contract measles, as so many others had, something must be wrong with them.

From the comforts of a TV room in suburban America, the Third World seems farther away than mere miles can measure. But the small group that gathered Wednesday night--eschewing for a couple of hours life’s more pleasurable pursuits to talk about world hunger and childhood immunization--wishes the rest of us would take a few minutes to think about that “other world” out there.

But what was happening in Burrell’s house had more to it than world hunger or childhood diseases. It was a snapshot of what’s possible in a country--and I’m talking about this one--where people are constantly complaining that nothing ever gets done.

Here was the scene at Burrell’s:

Besides Burrell and her husband, Roc, eight other women showed up. Some had attended the monthly meetings before; others were there for the first time. Some worked together as hairdressers, another was a retired physical therapist, another was in the health-care field. Roc Burrell is in the air-conditioning business; Andee Burrell does volunteer work. One of the women was six months pregnant.

They form the local branch of a national group known as Results, a Washington-based organization committed to ending hunger. Once a month, Burrell has a meeting in her home for the purpose of getting the volunteers to write letters on specific subjects, either to newspapers or elected representatives.

After watching the video, they read from a Results newsletter about the task at hand. This week’s topic: write a letter to a newspaper editor describing UNICEF’s success in increasing immunization rates around the world and to lobby for full congressional funding for immunization clinics.

The newsletter gave the volunteers some tips about what to write to the editors. The newsletter said that in the early 1980s, global inoculation rates were at 20%. By 1990, the report said, UNICEF and the World Health Organization had put the rate at 80%.

Translated, the report said, the higher rate meant that the lives of 3 million children are being saved annually.

The report went on to say that immunization rates in some U.S. cities are less than in some Third World centers.

That isn’t bogus information. I checked with the county’s Health Care Agency, and project coordinator Mary Wright said California officials estimate that as many as two-thirds of the state’s toddlers between 1 and 3 may not be getting their full complement of shots. The good news is that by the time the children enter some sort of school, the immunization gap is virtually eliminated. In Orange County, Wright said, 98% of preschoolers, day-care kids and kindergartners are immunized.

But I don’t want to clobber you with statistics. Rather, I’m trying to sell you on what was happening at the Burrells’.

The next feature was to play-act a scene with volunteer Mary Markus pretending to be a senator with the others making their funding appeal to her.

After that, the women (and Roc) drafted their longhand letters to editors. A few read them aloud, and I expect that at least one might make its way into the newspaper.

“People have gotten kind of hopeless (about affecting policy) and they say it doesn’t matter, blah, blah, blah,” Andee Burrell said. “But we know it does, but only because we’ve been doing it for so long. We’ve seen that the steady, slow nagging that we apply to our representatives and senators does pay off. You can’t change someone overnight, but they do listen and they do respond.”

Other than eating Burrell’s banana bread and drinking coffee, that was the evening. People were saying goodby by 9:30.

No one was claiming that they had changed the world, either on that night or next month or next year. But, at least, they were doing something .

“People rant and rave and say what a terrible time this is to be alive,” Burrell said. “I think it’s just the opposite. I think it’s a great time to be alive because there’s so much we can do and affect the way the world is going.”

I’m not trying to lay a guilt trip on you. It’s just that it’s very easy to lie on the couch and watch Game 4 of the World Series. There’s no shame in that.

But you’d also be surprised how easy it is to spend a couple of hours a month doing some volunteer work on an issue like world hunger and childhood disease.

There’s no shame in that, either.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.