Volunteer at BAS for nine years

Friday, February 17, 2012

George Pelletier photo
Bevin Brett, of Brookline, has been serving the community at the Brookline Ambulance Service for nine years.

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BROOKLINE – When you meet paramedic Bevin Brett at his Brookline home, you’ll probably notice his warm demeanor and soft New Zealand accent.

The first thing you’ll notice, however, are two huge alpacas that greet visitors off the Brett’s driveway.

“Those are my wife’s,” he said. “She’s quite the animal lover.”

Alpacas aside, Brett has been involved with the Brookline Ambulance Service for nine years.

“I’ve been a paramedic for six years; I had one year of paramedic school, one year as an Emergency Medical Technician Basic, and one year as an EMT Intermediate,” Brett said.

A volunteer with the Brookline Ambulance Service, Bevin’s “other life,” as he called it, began in New England in 1982, when he moved here from New Zealand.

“I came here to New Hampshire to work at Digital, followed them to Compaq then to Intel, so now I’m a software engineer at Intel.”

Brett works out of the house occasionally, maybe one day a week or he’s in his office in Merrimack.

He said his act of volunteering as a paramedic goes “back a long way.

My dad was a child of the depression back in New Zealand and I’m sure if he had an education, he would have gone into medicine,” Brett said. “But he couldn’t so he got involved with St. John ambulance, which is like volunteer, low-level emergency people in New Zealand at the time.”

That, Brett said, is when his father got his teenage boys involved when Brett was 10 years old, up until he was 17.

“That’s when I left for university,” he said. “And then some years later, when my kids had gone through their teenage years, I started thinking about getting back into it.”

Brett heard about the ambulance service and ran into friends, including Glenn Spargo, who’s a volunteer with the Brookline Ambulance Service.

“Glenn said, ‘Don’t wait. We need people right now,” Brett said. “So I went to see (director) Wes Whittier at BAS and it went from there.”

Brett underlined the importance of volunteering for the city of Brookline and surrounding towns.

“Volunteerism is the foundation for this service,” he said. “People hear about the ambulance service through word of mouth, but Wes is very active and goes to a lot of community events with a booth set up, and it’s amazing that when people see up, they’ve already had some kind of interaction with us in the community. And then they see that Wes is looking for volunteers.”

Brett noted that becoming a volunteer is, “an incremental process, as people often think about it for a year or more before they decide to actually try it and mostly when they join, they stay but there have been a few who have tried it for a year or two and decided that it’s not for them.”

Brett’s wife, Joy, was a trained nurse in Australia, but when they came to the states, her care skills shifted to the four legged variety, with a few birds thrown in for healthy measure.

“The nice thing about being a software engineer is that since we came to this country, she hasn’t had to go back to work,” he said. “She’s involved in a lot of community volunteering herself. She’s with the Brookline Women’s Group, the Community Bible Study, and the Pepperell Christian Fellowship. She volunteers driving people to their medical appointments.”

Meanwhile, the Bretts have three daughters who have all graduated university and gone on with their lives.

“My middle daughter is just finishing her third year of medical school,” he said.

Call it the Trickle Down Effect.

For Brett, he said his interest in the ambulance service has grown.

“The more you do, the more you’re entrenched. This actually surprised me because I have a history of trying things out and doing them for a couple of years and then they wear out. But this one hasn’t worn out,” he said.

Like a medical-Batman, Brett can gear up for a call in seconds; and during the week, there are a couple of evenings with shifts from 6 p.m.-6 a.m.

“I listen to the radio and when there’s a call, I gear up and go directly to the scene,” he said.

In addition to BAS, Brett works with American Medical Response and said he wouldn’t change a thing, juggling three working gigs.

“I’m happy with the way it all balances out. There are people walking around in these area towns because I or some other medical person arrived at their door. And a few months back, I was in a book store and the person servicing me said, ‘Oh, you delivered my baby.’ Actually, women deliver babies; we men just sit back and watch in awe,” he said.

To volunteer for the Brookline Ambulance Service, call Wes Whittier or Lee Duval at 672-6216 or e-mail ambulance@brookline.nh.us. Training is provided. For more information, visit the BAS website www.brookline.nh.us/pages/emergency.htm.