Chinook volunteer: 'You just feel good about it'

Courtesy photo

Betty Billmayer helps serve pie and ice cream at Sweet Memorial Nursing Home in Chinook during a recent pie social for residents and their families.

To honor volunteerism in north-central Montana during National Volunteer Week, every day this week Havre Daily News will be looking at some volunteers and volunteer-run organizations which help sustain our communities and enrich our lives.

A saying made popular in the mid-1990s asserts that "it takes a village to raise a child," but volunteers for another sector of society show it takes that village to best support the elderly, also.

Betty Billmayer, a lifelong Chinook resident, started volunteering regularly at Sweet Memorial Nursing Home in 2007 after the death of her father, who had been a resident at the home for 3 ½ years. She'd seen how activities with volunteers supplemented the work the staff did and helped enrich the residents' lives.

"I just really appreciated all the people that worked, and saw how important it was to have activities for (the residents) to do," she said.

"It gives me an opportunity to do some things for people who were good to my dad. You just feel good about it."

Billmayer organizes the annual Sweet Day which brings members of her Chinook Alliance Church to Sweet Home to work on a project for the home, like planting the garden or painting garbage cans, and they hold a barbecue with activities for the residents. She also hosts for residents twice-a-year pie socials, featuring pies she bakes and freezes at home throughout the year.

While she knows these events are important, as are the times throughout the week she drops in for visits, often with her twin granddaughters, Billmayer said the key to her volunteer efforts at Sweet Home is the Bible study she conducts with residents once a month.

"I knew that if I didn't do something on a regular basis where I committed to going every month or whatever that — life just gets busy and you forget, so I like to have a commitment that gets me there," she said.

And she recognizes that not only does life get distracting, but visiting nursing homes can be emotionally difficult for people.

"When (my dad) was first there, he had a lot of visitors because he lived here in the area all his life, but as his condition deteriorated not as many people came, and I understand that because it's hard," she said.

"It's hard to see people that are confused or maybe don't remember who you are. He had a few friends who were just so faithful, right up to the time that he passed away, to visit him, and we just appreciated that so much so I guess we just like to do the same for some people."

One of the ways she tries to give back and to help foster a sense of ease with the difficulties of volunteering at the home is to bring children with her to participate in the activities.

"I like to take kids out there," she said. "We'll take the kids from the church out, have them sing some songs or something because the residents always love to see the kids."

Billmayer sees an evolution in the children she takes to Sweet Home on a regular basis as they gain confidence with the new people, sights and challenges of a nursing home.

"The kids that have gone a lot, they know, if we're going to do an activity, they know to go start rounding up the residents and help them get down there, push their wheel chairs or whatever," she said. "Some of the parents have commented that they have kids that enjoy going out there, and they appreciate that they've had that opportunity."

Billmayer has plenty of volunteer experience with children, too.

In addition to spending time every other week of the school year listening to a child read at a Chinook school and helping with a community youth group that is a joint venture with four Chinook churches, she chairs the Loaves and Fishes free summer lunch program for school-aged children.

When Chinook residents discovered their schools didn't qualify for federal funding for a summer lunch program, she said, members of several local churches got together and started their own program. Entering its third year, Loaves and Fishes provides free lunch and an activity at the United Methodist Church fellowship hall throughout the summer to 20 to 25 children, said Billmayer.

The program operates, she said, on budget of about $6,000 per summer. Community members volunteer time for cooking and the many operational tasks, including the activity which also has seen firemen, police officers and the county health nurse come to interact with the children. Along with all this time and expertise being donated, she said, community members have, without being asked, donated enough money to cover the cost.

"It's really been great," she said. "We've just seen money from throughout the community that has come in to help support (the program)."

Billmayer, who has been on the Relay for Life committee for three years and helps her church cook the survivors' meal, is quick to point out that all of this communitywide commitment to helping neighbors, without thought for one's own benefit, is the heart of volunteerism.

"Most of the things I do involve kind of a group effort, and I think there's a lot of people that —like at the nursing home, there's a lot of great people that come and go there all the time and nobody knows," said Billmayer. "They're not asking to be recognized or anything."

During the Thursday bingo game at Northern Montana Care Center, Margaret Gill, a volunteer at the care center and North Central Senior Center since 2002, spins the bingo caller's basket and calls out the first number that drops.

In a room filled to capacity, residents lucky enough to get a match slide red chips onto their bingo cards to cover the number. Those people who can't manipulate their chips get help from volunteers stationed at each table.

One of those volunteers is a resident himself. Milan Pavlovick, a retired rancher from along the Missouri River southeast of Big Sandy, came to the care center in 2001 while dealing with health problems, but his robust attitude make it easy to imagine him back on the ranch.

He says he volunteers at bingo and delivering newspapers from the hospital to the care center wing "for something to do." But when asked why he volunteers rather than just doing things for himself, like taking up painting, he declares that he did take up painting.

"When I first got here, I helped paint the whole bottom section of the care center," he said. "There's three or four rooms I painted down there."

Pavlovick is pragmatic about his volunteering.

"I'm still able to do it. There's a lot of people here who are not able to do the stuff," he said. "And if it's beneficial to somebody, why not do it?"

Volunteer Caroline Hatty understands Pavlovick's outlook. She spent around 18 years as a Girl Scout leader, she said, and another 12 years so far volunteering at the Eagles Manor where she lives, the senior center and the care center.

"I like to help people," said Hatty, because it makes her feel useful.