What Is The Call To Social Work Essay

Submitted By cathyp0924
Words: 646
Pages: 3

Everyone’s “call to Social Work” is different. Each social worker has their different characteristics, personalities, and passions, making us all uniquely different. I might be headed into the same field as a fellow student of mine, but my “calling” is something very different than theirs. A lot of people look at the phrase “calling” and may think of it as a career choice, but I think it is so much more. A calling is something that you were put on this earth to do. Some sort of change or impact you were meant to make. I do not know all what I am called to do yet, but I do know that at this certain time in my life, it is not to work with the elderly. I recently read an article called A Personal Mission inside the book, The Call to Social Work (2002). In this article, Karen, a fifty two year old woman gave some insight to her daily routine as a social worker working with the elderly. She expresses her excitement and passion in following her calling. She gave some brief examples of some cases she has been involved in, as well as showcasing the variety of clientele.
Karen tells a story of an elderly woman getting abused by her daughter. The elderly lady had called in to get help with the maintenance of her lawn, but while Karen was there she had suspected much more was going on. Later in the story she reveals that the elderly lady was in fact getting abused by her daughter emotionally. She was using a walker to get around, but the home that she was living in was covered in trash, which made it even harder to function as an independent adult. Karen was eventually able to remove her from the home and more importantly, the care of her daughter. Karen then moves on to talk about this elderly couple who are Holocaust survivors. In a way, both of them were her client. The wife had Alzheimer’s disease, which caused her to verbally and emotionally abuse her husband. Karen had to be cautious in this case of both the wife, and the husband’s needs. She ended up placing the wife in a residential facility which allowed the husband to stay in his home without enduring the abuse. Karen then describes a case of a single fifty four year old woman who had diabetes and was not properly medicating herself and was found on the floor unconscious. Although she was young, she was placed in a residential