\u201cWe have all known the long loneliness, and we have found that the answer is community,\u201d wrote social activist Dorothy Day.<\/p>\n
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us have felt lonely, some despite the presence of family members and friends in our households.<\/p>\n
La Plata County\u2019s Community Health Action Coalition<\/a> offers a solution, a program called Creating Connections, which encourages area residents to connect with others, especially those who are lonely and in need of support.<\/p>\n Actually, the group of 20 or so volunteers was already addressing loneliness as an issue before the pandemic struck, according to Lynn Westberg and Pat Senecal, friends and volunteers in the program.<\/p>\n Among the group of 20-or-so CHAC volunteers was the late Lon Erwin, a well-liked and well-known Durangoan who had been head of Community Connections, a program for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. (There\u2019s that word again: connections.)<\/p>\n \u201cHe was just a good guy who loved people,\u201d Westberg said. \u201cIt was said if Lon was waiting to meet you and there was a bench nearby, you\u2019d find him sitting there, talking with someone.<\/p>\n \u201cHe knew the whole town. Three hundred people came to his funeral.\u201d<\/p>\n Senecal had learned of an evidence-based mental health initiative started in Zimbabwe called Friendship Bench<\/a> in which lay people are trained in outreach therapy. They meet with community members in public spaces, mainly just to listen to people talk about their lives and as a result, feel connected.<\/p>\n Erwin had been intuitively doing just that.<\/p>\n After Erwin died in 2019, a group of his friends purchased two benches in his honor that were installed along the Animas River Trail, one near Schneider Skate Park on Roosa Avenue on the west side of the river, and one at Santa Rita Park south of downtown.<\/p>\n CHAC\u2019s pre-pandemic plan was to begin training volunteers for bench-sitting and connecting with people, including people who are homeless.<\/p>\n Enter COVID-19. Abandoning bench-sitting for the time being, the group took a list of ways they had developed to safely connect with others and revised it to suit the pandemic. It was distributed to physicians throughout the community and to libraries. Some of the group pivoted to telephone outreach.<\/p>\n Westberg connected with seniors left isolated when Durango-La Plata County Senior Center shut down. The director, Vicki Maestas, suggested that some seniors might benefit from a simple phone call once or twice a week.<\/p>\n \u201cI ended up with seven people,\u201d Westberg said, as if surprised by her good fortune. \u201cThey\u2019re a kick, very independent.\u201d One of her favorites was a woman who coughed during their first conversation, explaining, \u201cYou can probably tell I smoke \u2013 but I don\u2019t drink and I don\u2019t chase men anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n Senecal ended up phoning 15- to 16-year-old teenagers disaffected from schools who felt very isolated.<\/p>\n Now that the pandemic is waning, the group looks forward to expanding, at least modestly. Senecal is turning the list of ways to connect with people into a bookmark and seeking money to print and distribute them.<\/p>\n Westberg notes that the issue of feeling isolated and lonely won\u2019t disappear with COVID-19. Those persistent feelings can be blamed in part on the way the region has become politically polarized, she said.<\/p>\n \u201cOur community wasn\u2019t always this divided,\u201d she said. \u201cI had the conservative of La Plata County on my (public health) board. We would stand on the corner and talk \u2013 never agreeing on anything \u2013 but we always parted friends,\u201d she reminisced wistfully.<\/p>\n Whether you\u2019re feeling lonely or want to help someone else who may be, in the end, both people on the \u201cfriendship bench\u201d \u2013 real or imaginary \u2013 benefit from the connection.<\/p>\n \u201cTalk with a stranger and make a new friend,\u201d say the inscriptions on the benches honoring Erwin.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re interested in learning how to reach out to others, visit chaclaplata.org and click \u201cCreating Connections.\u201d<\/a> If you\u2019d like to participate in the group, Westberg is planning a meeting in April. Contact her at lynnwestberg@gmail.com<\/a>. All Four Corners residents who would like to connect are welcome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" connection is important to all<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[125],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-47694","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-newsletter-opinion"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47694","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47694"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47694\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47694"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47694"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=47694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}