Another Weekend Away

I always have the best of intentions to continue posting when I'm away from home. It might happen some day.

Last Friday I helped out at the annual fundraising banquet for my old job. Since it was just 2 weeks after the last community dinner that we hosted for the inner city, some contrasts stood out for me stronger than usual.

When serving dinner to the clients, they file in and sit at long rows of plain tables. We serve them homestyle food on styrofoam plates with plastic cutlery. If they're lucky, there will be music provided by volunteers singing over the small PA system.

At the fundraising dinner, our guests are seated at elegant tables with centrepieces, silverware and cloth napkins. They are served a suptuous buffet, equal to a wedding dinner, and then move in to an auditorium for a program including guest musicians.

I know that there is good reason for some of these differences. There are more community dinners than fundraisers. We have to serve the dinners in a location the clients can walk to. Far more people attend these dinners than the fundraiser. We don't intentionally treat the clients with less care than the donors, do we?

I have never been quite comfortable with the way we (meaning non-profits) have to court and pamper donors. Maybe I'd feel better about it if it weren't for the biggest contrast I encountered that evening: the behavior of the guests. At a holiday meal in the inner city, for the most part, the people take their hats off during the prayer, sit where you tell them, help to clean up and thank everyone sincerely for the delicious meal on the way out. Many new volunteers will remark that people behaved much better than they expected.

At the fundraising banquet, people complained audibly when the doors were opened 3 minutes late, were impatient with the servers while being seated, didn't listen to instructions and demanded to be waited upon.

Maybe it's just my expectations, that I assume people with a lot more going for them, who have chosen to be generous and support a worthy cause would be more contented, cheerful and polite than those who are struggling with addictions, pain, abuse and poverty.

We get so used to being pampered in our society that we think it is owed to us. I'm sure my behavior is often shameful in public as well. I pray that God will change me into a grateful person.