Volunteers find niche at local aged care facility

A Yarraville aged care community welcomed a host of new visitors last Thursday, engaging them in morning tea, a barbeque lunch and even an impromptu game of tenpin bowls.

Doutta Galla Aged Services in Yarraville participated in Exxon Mobil’s twelfth annual Day of Caring, an internal volunteering initiative that sends company employees to various community institutions.

Doutta Galla Aged Services community engagement manager Lisa Lawler said the day was a huge success, with the volunteers taking away as much as the residents from the experience.

“A lot of them have grandparents and thought it would be a nice community gesture,” Ms Lawler said.

“They are now asking to come back next year,” she said.

For the residents, it was a day to look forward to with new faces coming in from the community.

“We do have partnerships with schools, but it was nice to have adults come in,” Ms Lawler said.

The ten volunteers were mostly engineers from the Mobil terminal and petrochemical refinery in Yarraville, two minutes from the local Doutta Galla Aged Services site.

Ms Lawler said the residents were fascinated by some of the changes the young engineers relayed.

“Forty years ago the refinery used to hire around 150 people and now they only hire 40, because a lot of the machinery is automated,” she said.

“They found it mind boggling.”

The day presented a further opportunity to get the residents out into the community, especially those experiencing mobility issues.

After the barbeque lunch, supported and funded by the volunteers, the group went out into the streets of Yarraville for an afternoon stroll.

Ms Lawler said many residents had grown up in the area, so they pointed out old landmarks to educate their companions.

“They don’t have a lot of opportunities to walk as a collective,” Ms Lawler said.

“So the volunteers got a lot of good banter out of that interaction.”

But the highlight of the day was inconclusively the whole-of-facility tenpin bowls game.

The lounge was cleared out to create a modified arena, with volunteers taking on residents in the spirit of friendly competition.

What happened next proved to be a sound equaliser.

“Age doesn’t really matter when it comes to tenpin bowls,” Ms Lawler said

“We had one resident who bowled two strikes in a row!”

 Image: A resident on his walk, with two Exxon Mobil volunteers. CONTRIBUTED.