Time to say goodbye

For many years I worked in the nether world of Non Governmental Organisations. These are organisations formed by governments to do things that governments want done but want to do more effectively and cheaply than they themselves could do them. The funding of NGO’s comes from governments both local and national and inevitably is short term and is often given or stopped at the whim of politicians.
To all intents and purposes that’s the way the Pilgrims’ Office in Santiago is funded. The Cathedral receives a specific grant from local and regional government to fund the work which is done receiving pilgrims in Santiago. Add the bureaucracy of government funding to the less- than- cutting- edge management skills of the Church and you’ll soon see where this story is going.
It is a feature of Spanish employment law that if those employed on temporary contracts are employed too long or too often they are given permanent status automatically with all of the rights that entails for them and the responsibilities it implies for employers. Therefore of the 20 or so staff in the Pilgrims’ Office around 90% of them are on temporary contracts and it is a condition of the funding which the Cathedral receives that they must not go beyond the limit of their temporary contracts.
Even though this is the Holy Year, even though the number of pilgrims has more than doubled, even though they have recently opened a brand new 175 albergue, even although the Pope is still to visit at the beginning of November when pilgrim numbers will again peak…in a magnificent demonstration of strategic forward planning almost the entire staff will leave by mid-September to be replaced by a completely new crew.
Some of the current staff have been associated with the office for some years having used gaps in employment as a way of coping with the temporary contract rules. Some have been there for shorter periods. Almost all are well qualified young people who want to stay in Galicia but because of the employment situation cannot easily find permanent employment in their chosen professions.

In the office they mostly get on very well together under the benign leadership of coordinators Maria and Eduardo who are themselves powerless against the bureaucratic rules. Don Jenaro the Canon in charge of Pilgrimages, the Boss and the link to the Cathedral adopts his most priestly, philosophical look. But there is also good news. Mari, a well known face from the Pilgrims’ Office is pregnant and will go off on maternity leave at the end of the year.
As a team they get on very well together. Paid little for their labours they turn up and day in and day out to deal with the lines of pilgrims. Most of us pilgrims are friendly, smiling and courteous. Others can be downright cantankerous. The staff do their best to maintain a warm welcome for each. This is challenging when every day they are looking at the same sellos and saying the same things, particularly “all the way walking?” The work is hard and relentless.

I think that they are a great bunch. They have been very helpful to me and I have seen how far they are prepared to go to help individual pilgrims in distress. They care about pilgrims. More than that, they care deeply about continuing the medieval traditions of welcome and issuing the Compostela. They hate cheats. They feel that someone who has got the bus or used a car is being very disrespectful to authentic pilgrims. Because they feel that sometimes their reaction can be a bit strong when someone arrives with few sellos or little evidence of a pilgrimage well made. Above all I am convinced that they have the well being of the pilgrimage at heart when they are issuing Compostelas or bed sheets in the recently opened albergue.

Soon they will all be gone. Some have left already as other jobs have appeared. So on behalf of all of us they have served over the last two or three years I thought we should say a collective Thank You.

In this little presentation which follows I apologise that I haven’t captured everyone. I’m aware that at least three are missing…Pili, Fernando and Katusha and probably others but there were limits to the amount of photostalking I could do whilst we were meant to be working. So fellow pilgrims if you have received your Compostela in the last few years join me in thanking some of the Pilgrims’ Office volunteers and staff of this Holy Year.