“How much?” I couldn’t believe that a house I rented for £4 a month was now selling for £150,000. Billy and Wendy Osborne, my co workers from 30 years ago were showing my wife and me my old neighborhood in East Belfast. Yes, that’s right the row house I lived in 30 years ago had just sold for $300,000. Prosperity cannot always be judged in pounds or dollars but the value of property was just one of the shocks I was in for on my recent trip back to Belfast. It was difficult for my wife to understand the world we worked in years ago. I was a long term volunteer with VSB in 1974. My area supervisor and my housemate was a gentleman named Stan Reid. Stan died in an accident in Scotland a few years after we worked together. Stan and a number of others were a great influence on me. The Belfast I came to love is better than ever with a lot fewer “distractions”. It took me a while to get my bearings but soon I was back on the Woodstock Road and remembering my work with the playschemes, the deaf and my weekly calls on old age pensioners. Through all of it I remember most the people I worked with who day in and day out left the politics out of community work. The unstated philosophy was then and it seems to be the same today was “one small act at a time makes the difference”. How we treated one another was as important as how we went about our work in the communities. We worked hard, we were conscientious and most of all we didn’t take ourselves too seriously. It was the lowest paying job I ever loved. What we didn’t get in our pay packets we got in laughs. Like the night I took a group of deaf kids to the Bay City Rollers concert. The kids loved the energy of the concerts and they could actually “feel” the sound waves. There were a few scary times when the fans thought our mini bus with the Deaf Society logo on the side was a perfect cover for the band. They crowded around our van looking for the lads from Scotland. There was also the day my clown partner Colin and I were in our costumes and we arrived at a playbus only to be sent away because the kids were afraid of us. A passing military patrol posed no threat to them but a couple of clowns were terrifying. I told Billy Osborne, that Belfast changed my life. I never looked on any situation the same after my year in there. It taught me that there is always another story behind the story. The everyday efforts of good will do make a difference. Whether it’s in South Africa, Bosnia or Palestine there are people who are there taking care of the business of caring for people I asked Maggie Andrews, a former VSB volunteer, how things were going and she said “We don’t worry about tomorrow we just take what we have today and today it’s good”

Pat Ryan