WINNIPEG – When farmers sit down on coffee row, they don’t talk about their personal problems.
Mike would know. He’s a mixed farmer in central Manitoba who had some stressful finances a few years back. “It got me down fairly bad,” he recalled.
“Then I got involved with some professional counselling and came out very much stronger for it.”
When he heard that the Manitoba Farm and Rural Stress Line was looking for volunteers to answer calls for help, Mike signed up.
“Farmers, when they get together, they’re only going to talk about their exaggerated yields and kind of maintain that cool front,” he explained.
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“I think (the stress line) is kind of the best situation you can create for a farmer to reach out and talk to someone.”
Remain anonymous
Mike, Ann and John (not their real names) are part of a group of 40 people who take turns answering the toll-free stress line. The volunteers are as anonymous as the callers, said Christine Kreklewetz, who helps co-ordinate the service.
“You might have someone who’s considering calling the line, who’s in distress, and then who hears in the coffee shop that his neighbor … is working on the stress line,” she said.
Mike said although few people know he has spent almost 250 hours by the phone over the past year, the work itself is reward enough.
“When I talk to a farmer that has problems and we kick things around for a while … I just get such a sense of feeling at the end of the call that this person just feels so much better just because somebody listened to him and somebody understood what he was saying.”
Work from farm
Ann joined the team because she was looking for volunteer work she could do from her home on a farm in western Manitoba. She recently retired after teaching high school for 40 years.
“I had been looking forward to retirement and doing all sorts of things with my husband, but then two years after I retired, he died.”
Ann discovered answering calls is a lot different from teaching: “You can’t just go around giving a whole lot of advice. You have to get people to think of things themselves, or lead them toward an idea. That’s different for me than teaching … I was the one making all the decisions, and you can’t do that with people’s lives.”
Ann has talked to 25 people over the past year, many of whom felt depressed, isolated or lonely and who just needed an ear.
“I’ve had a number of people mention that they’ve said things on the line that they could not say to their friends (because) they didn’t know who I was. They would never know who I was and they didn’t want to know,” she said.
A third volunteer, John, said most callers start off feeling uncomfortable but end up feeling relieved. “For me, personally, just having someone say ‘Thank you’ or ‘It was good talking to you’ at the end of the conversation, that’s my reward.”
John works for the government, but wanted to volunteer for the stress line to “give something back to the rural community.” He grew up on a farm and now lives in eastern Manitoba with his young family.
He has talked to farmers who are hostile toward banks because of financial problems, and a to scared, pregnant teenager.
But John’s toughest call was his first one, which was “probably a medium-risk suicide.” After he got off the phone, he called the co-ordinators of the line to get assurance he had handled it right.
Although the 40 volunteers are spread across the province, they get to know each other at training sessions and by talking to each other at the start and end of each shift.
“There’s a strong sense of fellowship and togetherness amongst this group,” Mike said. “I feel that I’m just part of something larger. It’s a good feeling.”
