On Retiring

It's difficult to give expression to the welter of emotions I'm experiencing right now. Trying to tease out all the different feelings is an impossible task. However, prominent among them is a strong sense of gratitude: I have had an excellent working life: when I discovered social work, I realised that was what I wanted to do. Within days of my starting work at All Saints Hospital in Chatham Kent I was offered the possibility of forming part of an alcohol team. I was too insecure to say no. That uncertain ''yes'' would give a definite direction to my life, a steady focus, a clear meaning - and helped graft a professional identity on a fumbling, floundering novice who until then had no clue about where to he should be heading. Within weeks I knew that that was my metier: I felt it in my bones, in every fibre of my body. At that time I could doubt anything, everything - from my own sanity to the existence of God - but not that all I really wanted to to do was work with alcoholics.

Mount Carmel Hospital came next and I was lucky to form part of a truly outstanding social work team. Most of our work there was with clients with mental health issues – the area where all new social workers should cut their teeth - but alcoholism featured quite prominently too. For the first time ever a dedicated ward for alcoholics was set up and the first ever alcohol team in Malta was formed, led by a foreign psychiatrist experienced in addiction work. She taught us the basics of work with alcoholics and we could venture outside the hospital and held meetings for drinkers and their families in the community. The MCH set-up was of itself limiting; we had to fit within hospital structures which did not leave enough room for creative work and did not take too kindly to initiatives which questioned the dominant ethos and challenged power dynamics. The stigma attached to MCH repelled a number of potential clients and after almost a decade, we seemed to be running on the spot.

Then, 23 years ago, sedqa was born and I was given the possibility to work within my preferred field full-time, and develop services.  How can I not consider myself fortunate? I grasped the opportunity with both hands. The early days were a heady mix of dreams and expectations and an exciting exploration of novel possibilities. There were times when my colleagues and I surpassed ourselves and soared but more often than not reality would rudely interfere with our plans and we would brought back down to earth with a thud. The list of failed initiatives grew - but very gradually so did the number of people our services managed to assist, motivate, prod, push and sometimes cajole into treatment - and a better, fuller life.

How can you not be grateful?  You were blessed with colleagues who viewed the world with similar, but never identical eyes, spoke the same language and knew where you wanted to go. They had your back, and because you could trust them you could take risks, knowing that they would check any erroneous before you could inflict harm. sedqa provided the true specialists, the social workers the doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists and nurses who knew their stuff and who could be relied upon to help clients in as nuanced a manner as possible. Not that it was a paradise – human relations will  always generate problems and a degree of conflict, and bureaucracy and political manoeuvering will hamper even the most determined workers  – but the sensation that one could rise above the negative aspects and collaborate because clients’ welfare so demanded  was stronger than anywhere else I’ve worked in. 

All told, I’ve had 34 years of this. I cannot recall one single instant when I rued the decision to work in the alcohol field. How can I not be thankful? People, hundreds of them, changed: lives were pulled back from the brink, families torn asunder by conflict and anger and pain helped to come back together, despair slowly transformed into hope, helplessness into self-belief. Inevitably in this field, failures outstrip successes, sometimes with spectacular awfulness: the demoralising relapses after years of dryness, the untimely deaths of those who will not or cannot change, the wrenching, devastating blow of the suicide which makes your very being shudder and fill with anguish. But even as you grieve you soldier on; you cannot afford to spend too much time feeling dejected and despondent: too many people require your undivided attention. Somehow, after a while, the wheel turns and an unexpected change for the better occurs and once again you’re energised and its’s all worthwhile. 

It’s over now. Apparently, very soon, the very name of  sedqa  may vanish into oblivion and within a few years will have been forgotten completely. Does anybody remember the SWDP, the first quasi-autonomous social work agency which, for while threatened to revolutionise the way social work was organised and delivered in Malta? Only hoary romantic freaks who harbour this strange notion the history is important and that in order to understand the why and wherefores – and the hows- of current practice you have to see it in historical context. But though the name will be gone, the spirit,  or some of it, will remain in the work. For, though changes will occur, the most fundamental interaction, that between clients and services, will remain. It is moulded by years of practice and reflection informed by theory, honed in supervision and and ingrained in our (actually no, no longer ''our''; I must get used to this) workers through hundreds of interventions with clients. It is not known which structures will remain, but the attitudes, I am convinced, will withstand whatever changes will take place.  

It’s over only in an official, formal sense.  The memories will... no, away with the cliches – I detest them anyway. There’s still plenty to do; exciting stuff, too - and most of it in the same field. So the relationship with the alcohol services is not quite over yet. Our paths will almost certainly cross again. The bond is too strong to be severed completely by something as mundane as retirement. And for that too, I can only say “Thank God’’.