Getting Started

As fall semester fast approaches, our first installment touches on the feeling of "getting started," being new in a role or place.  Told from the perspective of Karen Pfeil, Volunteer Coordinator.

Late summer... early fall... it's the season for Volunteer Orientations & Trainings.  We have four over the next month and a half, with over 50 potential new volunteers already scheduled to attend.  As always, preparing for a training involves lots of organization - horses, paperwork, revision after revision of how to best execute our presentation.  Jeanna and I want new volunteers to have the best possible experience and the best possible preparation for their volunteer roles.  And we know that starting something new can be both exciting and scary.

I've been the Volunteer Coordinator and an instructor at High Hopes Therapeutic Riding for just over six months now, and some of the newness is wearing off (though it's still, fairly often, exciting and scary in a variety of ways).  My involvement with High Hopes goes back two years further, when I first attended a Volunteer Orientation & Training myself - and I do remember how scary that was.

In fact, the day I came to Orientation, I was terrified. It wasn't that I lacked horse experience (I'd owned horses for years) or experience with special needs populations (I was a teacher). It's just that it's hard to be new in a place that you hope will be important to you, especially when the place is big and impressive. I was also at a difficult place in my life - just turned 30, divorced, discouraged with many of my personal and professional choices. The divorce, two years before, was a traumatic one (is there any other kind?) and there was part of me that thought I'd never heal. I did stuff - worked, dated, walked down the aisle in friends' weddings - but I felt like it didn't mean anything, or worse, like I didn't mean anything.

The training must have given me a sense of purpose because two weeks later I found myself leading therapy horses in classes at High Hopes.  In the first class, I led Petra for some of Kitty's Mile Creek kids, who were adorable and thrilled to be on horseback for the first time.  At the end of class, one of the boys dismounted from Petra and stayed to pat her shoulder.  While the rider and his sidewalker stood near her neck, Petra happened to shake her head at a fly.  And when that ample Fjord-y forelock shook away from her face, the little rider gasped: "Look," he said, pointing, amazement all over his face, "She has eyes!" I will never forget the sweetness of his surprise, the happiness of sharing that moment with him.

My next class was a little more challenging.  I was leading for a more independent rider - a girl about eight who didn't have a sidewalker.  The horse was Filly, an Arabian mare who was nearing the end of her long career at High Hopes.  The rider was nervous and kind of cantankerous.  "I have a headache," she complained, and I remember considering how/when/if I should pass that info onto the instructor.  Everything was so new.

Soon, however, my little rider was distracted by her instructor's direction: "At F ask Filly to T-ROTT!" (It's amazing how trotting cures headaches.)

But then our next problem began.  The rider couldn't get Filly to trot.  Neither could I.  The mare was not having it. 

"Eyes up!" called another instructor who had popped into the ring.  "Look where you're going and don't pull on her." (I realized the instructor was talking to me, not the rider.)  "Let Filly do her job - she knows it!"  Great, I remember thinking: 10+ years of horse ownership, 6 years of Pony Club, and a brief stint as an equine science major and apparently I can't even get out of the way to let an aging therapy horse do her job. Ugh.

When I left High Hopes that day, I wasn't sure how I felt about being a volunteer.  It was more challenging than I expected.  I remember driving north, towards home in Rhode Island, and looking, as I drove, at the pale moon already hanging in a still-lit sky, the way it often does in late summer.  I remember thinking to myself, "This was the first time in two years I've enjoyed spending time with kids like that.  The first time in five that I really smell like a barn."  I took a deep breath of that hay/fly-spray/horse smell.  Just then, I remembered, faintly, who I was.

That's what being a volunteer at High Hopes meant to me. Over time, this place has become part of my life in many new ways, but I still remember what a unique experience those early months of volunteering were.  Sometimes other volunteers share stories with me that echo these claims to finding deep personal meaning through the act of helping others.  For other volunteers, it is most pointedly about the chance to "BE with horses." 

So, when a few High Hopes staff members decided to start a blog, I wanted to share my own story, thinking it might invite or inspire others (participants, volunteers, staff, members of the larger community) to share what this place has meant to you over the time you've been here.  I hope you'll comment below, or ask questions if you have them.  Is there something you've always wondered about High Hopes? This blog is a place to post your questions.  Is there a story or an insight you've wanted to share?  Please do so by commenting below.  (Kindly remember not to name participants in the interest of protecting confidentiality.)  I hope you'll help us start a dialogue here that reaches out to a larger community of people whose lives have been influenced by their involvement at High Hopes.

Thanks! Welcome to the High Hopes blog!  I look forward to sharing stories with all of you.

~ Karen Pfeil, Instructor/ Volunteer Coordinator