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Bayla Kolton has been an American Red Cross volunteer for 20 years. Or maybe 25. She can’t remember the exact number on her volunteer service pin, she says, because her relationship with the Red Cross has been an important part of her entire life.
Like nearly 2 million people each year, Kolton learned to swim by taking American Red Cross lessons as a child. As she earned her beginning swimmer’s card, Kolton discovered a love of the water and ascended through the ranks of Red Cross trained swimmers, finally becoming a lifeguard as a teenager and a Water Safety Instructor while she was in college. She credits her Red Cross training courses with helping her land a job as an aquatics director, where she said she used the skills she’d learned from the Red Cross.
Kolton remembers the first time she performed CPR at the West Morris YMCA in Randolph, where she worked. A man was having heart problems, she said, and though her supervisor had offered to drive him to the hospital, it became clear that there wasn’t enough time. So, they called Kolton to perform CPR.
“He didn’t make it,” Kolton said, but she was glad she’d tried to help. And, it made it even more special when she could save a life. “The next time I did CPR for someone, they did make it, and it felt really good” she remembered.
Today, even after a surgery that left half her face paralyzed, Kolton uses her lifesaving skills to teach others as a volunteer instructor for the American Red Cross of Northern New Jersey, teaching CPR and AED classes and training other instructors to teach classes of their own.
Though she is usually paired with another instructor because her facial paralysis can sometimes distort her voice, Kolton said she still gets a lot from the work.
“I get to teach others—I know I’m a mentor,” she said, adding that she liked knowing she helped even more people than the ones she taught. “I teach somebody and they teach two people, then those people teach four people, and so it goes.”
In addition to her work as a volunteer instructor, once each week Kolton gathers the cane she uses for balance and proceeds to the Northern New Jersey chapter’s headquarters in Fairfield where she helps the Health and Safety Department’s staff sort through ever-mounting piles of paperwork. And, she’s made volunteering a family affair. Both of her children, a son, now 30, and a daughter, 26, have volunteered for the chapter. The daughter, Jessica, is currently a volunteer in the Development Department.
“It doesn’t cost anything—just some time,” she said of why volunteering has become such an important part of her life, and why other people can easily make it part of their’s.
In addition to her volunteer work, Kolton sings in her temple’s choir, likes to cook or do needlework, crocheting and knitting and “really enjoys” the book club she belongs to, but said volunteering at the Red Cross is her most meaningful activity.
“It’s not just something to do—It’s helping people,” she said. “It’s the little bit I can do to give back for what I’ve gotten from the Red Cross. It gives me a certain satisfaction, a good feeling, to know I’m helping people, a good feeling about myself and what I can do.”
by Emily Baltz, Communications Intern
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