“I have always admired people who donate their time to share their specialized skills, but I didn’t know that there would be opportunities like this for RMTs. When I first graduated, I was so focused on building my practice, I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t consider how I could contribute to the local or global community. I hope that my work with Canuck Place will change that.”

Anne’s colleague Jane Abbott, RMT realized a lot earlier on that she wanted to do unpaid work. After leaving her career in corporate finance, Jane knew she wanted to transition into a new occupation that would allow her more flexibility, time to travel, as well as the opportunity to volunteer.

Jane stumbled upon Liddle Kidz Foundation while searching for continuing education courses specifically to work with children. Liddle Kidz founder Tina Allen offers training sessions all over the United States, as well as Vancouver. She teaches massage therapists (and others in the health care field) how to use their skills. Ms. Allen’s website states their mission as, “to provide massage therapy to children with special health care needs, who are hospitalized or have been diagnosed with a terminal illness in hospice care.”

Unfortunately, Tina’s training session in Vancouver had finished about two weeks before Jane began her search. But Jane noticed a post on the website about volunteering in Vietnam, a country she had fallen in love with, on a trip there three years ago. Perhaps this was the exact opportunity she was looking for.

“I remember reading the posting initially and thinking, ‘I wish I was the kind of person that did these things. Wait a minute, I can be one of the people that does these things, that’s what I’ve been working towards!” Jane remembers with a laugh.

And off she went, where she connected with Anne and a group of volunteers who would spend 15 days travelling throughout Vietnam to provide training and massage services to orphans and their caregivers. They would arrive at about 9:00 am and Tina would run a demonstration class in which the volunteers partnered up with caregivers.

The volunteers mostly did basic massages for each body part, following a book Tina uses that has pictures and is translated into Vietnamese. These books were given to the orphanages, as well as caregivers and parents who travelled to take part in the training. They could take the books back to their community to share the simple massage techniques.

The volunteer group would work this way until lunchtime and then in the afternoon would work directly with the children. Anne says that they would “usually try to seek out any kids with disabilities. Typically the kids with severe disabilities aren’t out of their beds and in the common areas, so we would go and try to find them. They were often the ones who needed our attention a bit more.”

If the older kids were in school during the morning class, the volunteers would work with them in the afternoon. Often volunteers played games that demonstrated nurturing touch as a way to interact with each other, as well as teach the younger children. “If you just go in and massage kids for one or two days at one facility,” says Anne,“it’s great, it’s useful, but it’s not going to give you a long-lasting legacy of any sort. I think that’s a really big thing about Tina’s outreach.

“Think long term: how is this going to help them? The best part was that a lot of the older kids wanted to learn, they wanted to do it for the younger kids. So you’ve got, not just the caregivers, but also the older kids involved. It was really wonderful to see.”

Being a RMT especially helped with this kind of work. Not only because of Anne and Jane’s hands-on experience, but also because of their education.

“I found myself in a position to be able to explain a little better the whys behind what we were doing,” says Jane, “the physiology and the make up of what we were working on. If we’re trying to help a baby get rid of their gas by doing certain motions on their belly, we can explain what organ we’re tapping into, what we’re trying to facilitate, tell them why it’s happening and be able to go a bit more in depth, so they understand why they’re doing what they’re doing.”

All in all, Anne and Jane had positive experiences working with Liddle Kidz and taking time out of their practices to volunteer. Would they do it again? Both of them absolutely would.

Anne advises: “But don’t wait as long as me! I’ve been practicing for over 10 years and I haven’t done anything like this and it’s just amazing. I never thought there were [opportunities like this] because I had never heard of anything, but when you start looking around, there are lots of things you can do with massage therapy.”

This article was first published in Massage Matters Canada: A Journal for Registered Massage Therapists (spring 2013).