Your Lifestyle

Still Inspiring: July - Elma Fleming

We came to Australia eighteen years ago and I've been at the Wayside Chapel for sixteen. I started as a fulltime volunteer and now I'm a paid person: Director of Human Services.

I oversee all that goes on. Two thousand human beings come through the door every week: they may come into the Op Shop or the Chapel itself or they might need assistance from the crisis centre. Or just a safe place to be. We work with homeless persons and try to find them a bed for a night or refer some to a rehab. Sometimes people just want to talk. You don't have to be madly knowledgeable to volunteer here. You just need to be able to listen and communicate.

Forty per cent of the calls we take are from people who are employed and accommodated but are desperate in some way. Gambling is an issue that is huge. We might get a call from someone who has gambled away all their money and hasn't got the courage to tell his partner. It might be a mental health problem or a relationship problem. Drug and alcohol and mental health and gambling – these aren't respectful of who they affect. They just affect everybody across the board.

A lot of the people we meet here have been reported missing but unless the person is underage, the best we can do is form a bridge between them and the family. It's not against the law to go missing. I'm on the Committee for the Family and Friends of Missing Persons and we always say that for every one missing person there's at least twelve people's lives affected. If you've ever lost something like your wallet, you know that feeling. Then imagine to lose a person in your life and the ongoing unresolved grief.

I do some work in gaol, as well. I take a great interest in the mothers and babies unit up at the Emu Plains Correctional Centre. I go to talk to girls and beg, borrow or steal prams and clothing and all sorts of things. Provided it was a non-violent crime, the girls in there can have their children with them up to school age. And then on weekends and holidays they can have older children stay. It's a nice environment. They live in cottages and they look onto fields and they're learning skills that perhaps that haven't been able to learn at home. Sometimes I joke and I say to my boss: 'Can I have a weekend in gaol myself? Where no-one can find me!'

Most mornings, I spend some time with my dog. He's my soul mate. I tell the dog everything whether he wants to hear it or not. He's a bit short on the brain side but very loveable. And then I'm out of the house by 6:00am. I usually pop up the road before I come into work, just to talk to, you know, to the girls who work in the streets. They all call me Mum, Elma or Sis. And then I'm in Wayside by 7:00. I'm supposed to finish at 3:00 but that's not happened yet!

I'm somebody who switches off very easily though and if I couldn't do that, then I'd need to give up this kind of work. I smile as I drive away from the Cross. By the time I drive down the road and see the water at the bottom of Macleay Street, I'm in another world. I can relax with the best of them. I have heard so many terrible, sad stories but human beings are rather strange. Of all the stories you hear, the sad and the desperate, you hear one good story and that's what you latch onto. We carry the good stories with us all the time.

Do I ever feel spread too thin? Oh quite often, I'm like everyone some days. I lie in bed and I think, ‘Oh no, I've got to get up and go to work.' But once you're in here, you get as well as giving. And you leave some days and something that has happened has you falling about, laughing all the way home. For example, you've found somebody who's overdosed and you've just literally saved their life probably. You've breathed for them until they get the help they need. And yet, when they come around and regain consciousness, they sit up and call you everything under the sun because you've just wasted their fix! In this job, you never get ideas above your station!

I'm just sixty-one this year. If I have the strength and I can still do it without being a burden, I'd like to keep going as long as I can. I don't know what else I would do with myself. I'm not good at sitting at home and looking at four walls … unless the rugby union was on twelve months of the year, that is!



Further information on the activities the Wayside Chapel can be found at www.thewaysidechapel.com