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In 2006, the Beverly Foundation of Pasadena, California conducted a survey of 45 organizations across the country that provide transportation through volunteers to senior residents of their various communities. In that survey they requested short essays from those volunteers about their experience. This resulted in a book entitled Stories from the Road that describes the experiences of over 245 drivers and what they found rewarding about their drives of clients to various destinations and the journey along the way. The experience along the way was mostly the stories from the clients, the joy of meeting new people and knowing you are providing help, truly needed, by those individuals.
Our book, Stories from the Road, from the Back Seat, tells the stories of some clients. Mostly they are sitting in the front seat as they are helping with directions to their doctor's office, grocery store, drug store, exercise building or hairdresser. And in between directions they are telling their stories about their kids or grandkids, or work they did or hobbies they still do. You will have to drive the same clients several times to get anything close to their life story. The staff in our office who set up all the rides picked six clients at random that should be good to interview. I sat down with them in their homes to get a complete story. Interestingly, some of them had little gaps in their memory but that tells you how long their stories were in some cases. These people had vastly different life stories and backgrounds. There is a couple who are both blind and went to the Texas School for the Blind and the many twists and turns of their life experiences. Another gentleman, an artist, who later developed multiple sclerosis and how it affected his life. Another guy whose father built the first airport in Lexington, Kentucky and, not surprisingly, became a pilot with many adventures and twists and turns. A lady, born in Austria in 1938 and her complex youth, winds up in Austin, Texas with lots of changes in a very different adult life.
I hope you will see how our volunteer drivers might get great joy out of their visits with the clients.
