Being paid to do the job

or being paid something extra to do the same job?

Our "honours" list has just come out. There have also been the usual "....of the Year" awards - young and senior included.

I had a quick look through the lists this morning as I prowled my way through the online papers. Nothing much has changed. Over the past couple of decades the lists have become more and more "politically correct". Awards are given to people who are involved in activities that are deemed "worthwhile" by those in power. Sport features heavily in the lists. 

It is very rare to find an award given to someone who has spent forty years volunteering at the local opportunity shop or the same time keeping the local railway station tidy and the little garden alive. They rarely get thanked, let alone acknowledged in any public way.  

I went to a funeral yesterday. I went because her daughter has lived overseas for many years.  She did not know her mother's friends, indeed had never met them. I knew her only because her mother had needed some help with paperwork before moving, all too briefly, into an aged care residence. Her stay there was so brief I did not even have the opportunity to visit her a third time. Nobody else went at all.

And yet this woman had volunteered. She had worked in the school canteen, been on the school council, run a Scout troop, taught Sunday School, volunteered at a charity shop, belonged to a service organisation and more. She had even been a founding member of a now state wide crafting organisation, the Secretary, Treasurer and twice President of the organisation.  She was good at those jobs and pleasant with it.

I was surprised to find less than twenty people at her service. It was not private. It was not "invitation only". In the space of four years people simply seemed to have forgotten her and all she had done for them. I wonder how this could happen when the church was full for the Senior Cat's service, full of people from many parts of his life. I know that Covid has not helped these things but it seemed to be more than that.

Why are some people "forgotten" and others are not?