{"id":176,"date":"2026-04-16T15:18:40","date_gmt":"2026-04-16T15:18:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/heuristic-yonath.40-160-33-16.plesk.page\/?p=176"},"modified":"2026-04-16T15:18:40","modified_gmt":"2026-04-16T15:18:40","slug":"from-health-care-to-food-this-mother-daughter-volunteer-duo-at-lccm-know-how-to-handle-an-emergency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/heuristic-yonath.40-160-33-16.plesk.page\/?p=176","title":{"rendered":"From health care to food, this mother-daughter volunteer duo at LCCM know how to handle an emergency"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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April is National Volunteer Month. We want to celebrate our volunteers by telling their stories!<\/em>In her career in the emergency services field, Dorlee Kreitzer knew how handle an emergency.So when she retired from the Pennsylvania State Police after years as a police communications operator and instructor, she came to Lebanon County Christian Ministries to volunteer her time to serve people who were experiencing a different kind of emergency.A year later, her daughter, Nicole Kreitzer, an EMT with First Aid and Safety Patrol, would join her to help service people in need of emergency food, clothing and shelter.\u00a0\u201cAs an EMT, an emergency is life or death,\u201d Nicole said. \u201cThey have a situation happening now that if we don\u2019t fix, it could kill them. Whereas when there\u2019s an emergency here (at LCCM), if we don\u2019t help them it doesn\u2019t mean they will die today, but they could have a long-term issue if we don\u2019t help them today.\u201dAs an emergency dispatcher, Dorlee heard her share of heartbreaking pleas for help over the phone for everything from medical emergencies to domestic violence, overdoses and car crashes.<\/div>
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Over her long career she served as an EMT, firefighter and dispatcher for Lebanon city and state police, and served as a dispatch instructor.So when she started at LCCM nearly a decade ago, she had one request.\u201cI had spent 26 years listening to people\u2019s problems, and I don\u2019t want to do that anymore,\u201d she recalled telling the volunteer trainer. \u201cI said, I think I want to be put in the warehouse away from people.\u201dBut Dorlee said things didn\u2019t work out that way, and God had other plans for bringing her to LCCM. Plans that involved \u2013 you guessed it- listening to people\u2019s problems.\u200bShe started out in the food pantry, where she interacted with guests who came to pick up their emergency food orders. A need opened up for an intake specialist twice a week who would interview guests in need of food and clothing, but staff were having a difficult time finding a volunteer to fill the position. Dorlee offered to do it temporarily until they could find someone else.\u00a0<\/div>
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She turned to Nicole and laughed, saying, \u201cwell, that ended up being permanent!\u201dShe interviewed people for years and found out about their employment situation, the bills they owed, debt, the relational issues they faced, as well as their health issues, transportation woes and other obstacles. Some problems were out of their control, but others were self made, she said. And she struggled finding the balance between being tough and being loving. After spending her career in emergency services, she said she had become callous \u2013 not because she wanted to, but because she had to do the job.\u201cIn all fairness to everyone involved in emergency services, you have to have thick skin because to deal with the death, to try to get someone out of a car who is injured, or just helping someone who can\u2019t breath \u2026when someone says \u2018please help me\u2019 you have to have thick skin because otherwise you\u2019re not going to make it through,\u201d she said. \u201cSo when I came here, I was callous and didn\u2019t want to be \u2013 and I think God brought me here to soften my heart. Maybe I was brought here to soften my heart and realize I could still be tough, but no longer callous.\u201d\u200bNicole agrees, and said she and her mother both learned life lessons at LCCM and have grown in their Christian faith thanks to their church and their time volunteering.Nicole said she has learned to not judge people without speaking to them. She gave an example of how a guest showed up with seven children to received emergency food. As it turns out, the woman who came took in a friend\u2019s four children and was temporarily taking care of all these children by herself. \u00a0\u00a0<\/div>
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\u201cWhen they came in here the one little girl, she was about 4 years old, they had all this food. Now think about how much food this was. And out of all the food that she was most excited about, she said, \u2018there\u2019s milk!\u2019\u201d Nicole said, looking up as if she were talking to God and said \u201cI am so sorry!\u201d\u200bNicole also said the friendships she has made at LCCM over the years have been crucial to her life. Two years into her time here, she was diagnosed with a benign brain tumor that grew to the size of a golf ball, and staff visited her at home as she recuperated.Since then, Nicole had been able to share her testimony about how she was able to resume a normal life just six weeks after surgery. She has been reminded at LCCM that there are people who may be struggling more, and that no matter where she is, she can share her experience with others.\u201cThere are testimonies all around us,\u201d Dorlee chimed in. She gave two examples. Dorlee sat in the waiting room at Hershey Medical Center years ago while Nicole underwent surgery to remove the tumor. An employee could tell Dorlee was distraught, so she tapped her on the shoulder and said she too has a brain tumor, and that it\u2019s inoperable.\u201cAnd she said \u2018but it will be OK.\u2019 It was just one of those things. God gives you testimonies everywhere.\u201d\u00a0The other example was when a woman came to LCCM for an emergency food order. She told Dorlee that she was diagnosed with cancer and all she wanted to do was go back to work. She had asked if LCCM had any Ensure, a protein drink that was too expensive for the woman to afford.\u201cAnd for some reason or another,\u201d Dorlee said, \u2018we had just gotten an entire case of Ensure that morning\u2026we just piled her up with this Ensure because we don\u2019t give it away to too many people. Those are the kinds of things to me that I think God brought me here for. Just to show me that no matter how hard life gets, there\u2019s always someone who has it a little worse\u2026this is my happy place.\u201d<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

April is National Volunteer Month. We want to celebrate our volunteers by telling their stories! In her career in the emergency services field, Dorlee Kreitzer knew how handle an emergency. So when she retired from the Pennsylvania State Police after years as a police communications operator and instructor, she came to Lebanon County Christian Ministries […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":177,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/heuristic-yonath.40-160-33-16.plesk.page\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/heuristic-yonath.40-160-33-16.plesk.page\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/heuristic-yonath.40-160-33-16.plesk.page\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/heuristic-yonath.40-160-33-16.plesk.page\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/heuristic-yonath.40-160-33-16.plesk.page\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/heuristic-yonath.40-160-33-16.plesk.page\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/heuristic-yonath.40-160-33-16.plesk.page\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/heuristic-yonath.40-160-33-16.plesk.page\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/heuristic-yonath.40-160-33-16.plesk.page\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/heuristic-yonath.40-160-33-16.plesk.page\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}