To Be So Lucky, A Volunteer's Experience
Submitted by: Breeana Bornhorst
Phone: 703-764-0269
Email Address: info(at)nvtrp.org
Date Added: 3/19/2006
Our volunteers are the heart and soul of our program. Volunteers assist our riders, maintain our barn, build our gardens, photograph our events, raise funds for our program, serve on our Board of Governors. Without the collective effort of our volunteers, NVTRP would simply not exist. We are grateful to all who give NVTRP their time and talent. Rachel Cantor has written this wonderful essay for her college applications. The essay captures the spirit, challenges and triumphs of volunteering. Please enjoy!
To Be So Lucky, A Volunteer’s Experience
By Rachel Cantor
The children that I work with on Saturday mornings are Autistic, or have Multiple Sclerosis, Mental Retardation, Down Syndrome, and even sight and hearing disabilities. But, every weekend for the past four years I have watched and helped these kids mount one-thousand-pound animals and learn to control them. Not only do they learn to ride the horse that they are assigned to for the day, but the children at the Northern Virginia Therapeutic Riding Program also learn to overcome their own disabilities and develop a strong connection with the horses. A community service project that was only meant to last 60 hours has managed to not only captivate me for four years, but has also changed my way of thinking and my goals for the future.
When I first heard about therapeutic riding, I was already interested in art therapy, and had visited a renowned art therapist at work in order to find out more about using art as a therapeutic tool. But I had to do my community service somehow. Being the horsewoman that I am, I decided to work with the Therapeutic Riding Program, which needed volunteers. It turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life.
Let me start by saying that I have never been good on competitive teams because my teammates always seemed to want to compete against each other and not as a team. So I never really understood teamwork until I started volunteering at Therapeutic Riding. Before I got to work with the kids, I had to learn about working with the other volunteers. The hardest thing for me was that I didn’t know how to act around so many people that I had never met before. None of us really knew each other and had no idea how much to trust anyone else. The first thing I learned was that I had better darn well start trusting everyone else or nothing would work right. We all had to chip in to get stalls done in the morning, round up the horses in order to brush and tack them up, and get the horses safely up to the ring in time for lessons to start. If I ever thought that I could get out of doing some “lowly” task such as sweeping the tack room, fencing, or scrubbing water buckets in the middle of winter, I was quickly corrected. We all had to do our share of the work in order to keep things running. We are what keep things running. You have to be able to trust your fellow volunteers to do whatever job they are doing well -- especially if you are one of six people attempting to carry a shed roof through a gate opening meant for a horse’s slim body!
Needless to say, even though volunteers change periodically, those that I’ve been with for four years are the sort of people I would trust to do just about anything. None of them would ever turn their nose up at a hard task; they would do their best and ask for help if it was needed. And since the volunteers range in age from fourteen to sixty years old, we all have different levels of endurance and different jobs that we are best suited for. No one is afraid to ask for help, and no one would refuse to give help. If a volunteer is having trouble with a horse or with a rider, her comrades help think of a way to solve it. Thus, I have come to trust in my fellow volunteers as my teammates in physical aswell as mental challenges. We all want things to work so badly that they usually do—through teamwork.
The most amazing part of volunteering with The Northern Virginia Therapeutic Riding Program, though, is the improvement seen in the riders. What a joy it is to finally see a rider who I have been working with for a year sit up on his own for the first time! Or to see the smile on the face of a rider the first time she successfully steers her horse through a set of cones. Or to watch a rider learn to stand up and balance on the back of a horse while vaulting. The wonderful thing about working with the riders is that I do get to see them improve drastically. However, this improvement is usually slow and erratic, so as a volunteer I must watch very carefully and make sure that ample praise is given to a rider who has accomplished something, no matter how small. I have learned to be very, very, very patient. I have also learned to give myself and my teammates ample praise when a goal is realized. I use praise instead of punishment with the horses, which is one of the reasons our horses are so friendly and willing to work.
After being indoctrinated into this way of thinking, and after seeing how far a little praise goes (especially when it is from the instructor to me), I realized that perhaps this way of thinking is applicable to my everyday life. I started to use it. And, amazingly, it worked! No matter whether I am using this system of praise in a relationship or with my classmates while working on a lab, the results are the same. More gets done, and everyone feels better about their work. Trust is built.
The environment that surrounds the Therapeutic Riding stables is unique. I have grown to enjoy the trusting, learning, and hard work that goes into teaching these riders so much that I doubt I get any less from the program than they do. When I see a little girl who lately had problems controlling her muscles overcome her disability and learn to ride, it encourages me to work all that much harder at life, because I know it can be done. In going off to college and in having to make a life for myself, I never want to have to leave those volunteers, instructors, riders, horses, and life lessons behind. I have decided that I cannot leave them behind! Instead, I will learn all I must in order to teach future volunteers and riders what it is like to be so lucky.
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