Brotherly advice

I am in my early 40s. My four children, whom I was always close to, have grown to adulthood and moved on with their lives. I always spent every minute I could with them and now put my energies into the children at my church through teaching Sunday school. However, I have so much more to offer.

The answer was the Big Brother-Big Sister program. I made the phone call and filled out the stacks of applications, reference requests, background checks, insurance checks and criminal background checks. Your June 3 article, “Waiting for a friend,” stated there is a lack of male volunteers and the waiting period is several weeks to get hooked up with a child. I was told at the outset that the background check alone takes about three months.

I initiated the process in August 1999. Upon calling, I was told the only caseworker had 40 cases and could handle no more at that time, but I would be placed on a waiting list. I was told there was an abundance of men volunteering, but not enough money or caseworkers to handle it. In Bangor and the surrounding region, they said they could only handle 40 cases. I would have to wait a few months. In January, I still had heard nothing. So I called to follow up. I was told no matches had been made since the previous June due to a lack of funds and because a couple of my background checks had not been received back. They had never followed up on these until I called and I had no way of knowing they had not received them. They soon received these missing pieces, but nothing has changed.

It is now June. I have been waiting for 10 months and so have many boys in desperate need of mentors. The past 10 months have been wasted. The problem with lack of mentors does not fall in the category of lack of male volunteers, as your article stated, but in the slow foot-dragging of the Big Brothers program. It’s a shame I have so much to offer and local boys need so much, and yet we are at the mercy of red tape and foot-dragging.

Let’s move this system along. How much money does it take to spend an afternoon of miniature golf and ice cream, or throwing a Frisbee? This doesn’t cost Big Brothers a cent. How can money be the problem? It is not necessary for the program to pay for anything. They need only to make the matches and let the mentoring begin. Randy Campbell Brewer