Today bloggers are suppose to blog about their volunteering. Sooooo, I have to pick one of the issues I volunteer for. That one is the Veterans Administration visitations I make. One of the missions of the National Cartoonists Society, of which I belong, is to visit the V.A. hospitals around my state of Floirda. I help our members get to the ones in our state and often go myself. We’ve visited a number of places around the state. Most specifically in Orlando and Tampa.

There I draw our greatest American heroes and try to bring a brief bit of laughter in their life. The Orlando V.A. location is a nursing home for American veterans. I’m usually in the cafeteria area where most are confined in wheelchairs. Also usually Bingo is being played or some such. Natalie, the activities director, will point out folks who want to be drawn or have a drawing of something made for them.

In Tampa, Steve (Dang! I forget his last name again!) is the leader. There we’ve mostly gone room to room to draw folks. Unlike the nursing facility, in Tampa I’ve mostly seen soldiers who have recently returned home for treatment from the current war in Iraq. One of the great experiences I had there was making a recently returned soldier have the greatest laugh he’d had since arriving at the hospital. This fellow came back in a state where he could no longer communicate or functionally move. He had a very reduced ability to make noises to let people know how he was. He no longer had the realization of the world around him and was basically back to being much like a baby. His method of laughing was by crying after I drew the drawing and his wife showed it to him, he bawled nearly out of control. Steve let me know that was the most he’d reacted since arriving at the hospital. The drawing above is of that brave soldier.

My next stop to the Orlando V.A. is Wednesday and I and ‘Marvin’ cartoonist, Tom Armstrong, will hopefully be back in Tampa in January. Below is from August and is of Tom, myself and a REAL volunteer. The lady in the middle had clocked in over 32,000 hours of volunteer work at the Tampa Haley V.A.