Volunteer Spotlight: Suba Saty

Northern Virginia is home to scores of active and involved AARP volunteers. This month I spoke with volunteer Suba Saty, who immigrated to the United States from India as a child and spent more than 30 years with the U.S. Air Force before retiring in 2014. We met on a weekday afternoon at Peet’s Coffee in Springfield, Virginia; our conversation has been edited for length.

To start off, tell me a bit about yourself.

You want me to give you my whole name? My entire Southern Indian name is Subaker Satyanarayan, but I found out when I came to this country 50 years ago that it was too hard to pronounce, so my first name became Suba and my last name became Saty. I’m a Community Ambassador for AARP and the Facilitator for AARP’s Northern Virginia Speakers Bureau.

My dad was a civil engineer. When I was 11, my parents decided to come to the United States – to Estherville, Iowa, near the Minnesota border. Of course, it was very cold and we just thought we were on the other side of the moon at first. We spent three years in Iowa and then moved to another very small town in Tennessee. After I graduated from college in Tennessee I didn’t quite like the job offers I got, and a neighbor who was a retired colonel said: “Have you thought about the military?” One thing led to another and ultimately I went to officer training school. I spent nine years in the active duty Air Force and 16 years in the active reserve, and 15 years in various civilian jobs within the Department of Defense. My job entailed everything to do with the base activities, which in the Air Force are called service activities. Child care, golf courses – everything on base, which is sort of like a town. Basically, I was like the mayor and I ran all those facilities.

In addition, for more than 10 years I was the Armed Forces Sports Secretariat, handling the sports, the budget, the logistics, and so on for U.S. military personnel interacting with foreign nations all around the world. Our motto was “Friendship Through Sports.” I got to go to some very interesting countries for meetings to collaborate with other countries.

Throughout my career, I gave a lot of presentations to a lot of audiences, including international audiences. When I started out, I was scared stiff when I spoke to a group! I give all the credit to my first mentor, my first real boss, who told me to relax and imagine having a conversation with my audience. “Put some humor into it and make it your own.” I still follow that motto, no matter where I’m speaking.

What led you to volunteer for AARP and what are your volunteer tasks?

At the time I retired, I was the fitness athletic director at Andrews Air Force Base. I was ready to do something else, and I went on interviews with different organizations to learn about their volunteering opportunities. Everyone I talked with said “This is what we have for you to do,” and it just wasn’t my cup of tea. Then somebody told me about AARP. I said, “I don’t want to do insurance!” Because that’s all I knew about AARP – they have insurance programs.

Well, my friend convinced me to look into it and it turned out that AARP asked me what I wanted to do, instead of telling me what they wanted me to do. As the service director on base, I had to interact with a lot of people and I always enjoyed that. I like to give presentations and help people understand issues, and AARP has opened up a whole new world of opportunities for that. AARP provides prepared materials for presentations to groups on a range of topics. Two of my favorites are “Avoiding Fraud and Identity Theft” and “Brain Health,” but I’m familiarizing myself with several others and will be branching out to give those as well.

I also help to organize special events for AARP, such as the AARP Academy. That’s a day-long or half-day-long series of presentations on topics of interest to AARP members and potential members. Organizing events is another skill I brought from my career. I love working out the logistics, getting people involved, coordinating with people, coordinating with the host organization. It’s a challenge, but I really enjoy it.

What are some important points you make in your AARP presentations?

In my presentations and when I’m staffing an AARP table, I try to show people all the different ways AARP can help them. To start with, AARP isn’t just for older folks. AARP’s “Prepare to Care” materials are invaluable for those in their 50s and 60s who are helping their parents make decisions about future care. And, of course, AARP has many materials to help people understand Medicare, Social Security, prescription drug prices, and similar issues that will affect everyone sooner or later.

Even the presentations on topics like brain health and fraud are for everybody. I make sure that whatever I learn about fraud I tell not only my in-laws, who are almost 90 years old, but also my younger relatives who think they’re too smart to be cheated. They’re on their phones all the time. I tell them that just because the Wi-Fi is free doesn’t mean you should do your banking in a public place. Because that nice gentleman or lady sitting next to you drinking coffee is stealing your information. Present company excluded, of course!

What is something positive that younger folks should know about aging?

Whenever I do something interesting in my volunteering, I share that with my family here in the U.S. and with my family in India. I go to Capitol Hill with AARP members to visit elected officials, I do interviews, I appeared in a “Get Out the Vote” video, and I talk about all those experiences. My relatives, especially the younger ones in their 20s and 30s, say “Wow, Uncle Subaker, you did all these things and you’re giving me something to look forward to!” It’s helped them learn that aging is not what it used to be and that you can stay active in so many different ways.

Sometimes I feel my age, for sure. A few aches and pains don’t bother me, but now that I’m older if I get injured it takes longer to heal. But that’s just something I’ve learned to live with.

What would you tell others who are thinking about volunteering with AARP?

The wonderful thing about AARP is that you can do what makes you happy. If you simply want to staff the AARP information table – what we call “tabling” – at an event every now and then, go for it. If you want to do a lot of different things – tabling, giving presentations, staffing the “Dinners for Grownups,” engaging in advocacy at the local, state, or federal level – you can get involved in all of that. And whatever you choose, you’ll meet other interesting volunteers with a wide swath of experience and knowledge.

Do you volunteer for other organizations, too?

I volunteer at Lorton Library as an English Conversation leader and at Kingstowne Senior Center where I do the same thing. And I volunteer at an elementary school through GrandInvolve. The schoolteacher has a plan for me to follow, so every volunteer day is a little different, but it always ends with me reading to the kids. All these first and second graders are huddled on the floor listening to every word I’m saying, and I get to put some fun into that. On a typical Wednesday, I’m going from the senior center to the elementary school – from 75-year-olds to seven-year-olds! And I get a lot of satisfaction out of all my volunteer activities.

Besides your volunteering, what do you do for fun?

Outside of the fun of volunteering – and teaching tennis – the number one passion for my wife and me is to travel and discover new places. I’ve been to all 50 states and I’ve traveled to 25 countries and counting. Part of our goal is to visit every national park in the United States. There are 59 of them and we’ve got six remaining.

We hope to take a trip to New Zealand with a stop in American Samoa on the way, so that will take care of that national park. The other five are in remote destinations in Alaska. We have that on our list of things to do and we’re hoping to get there, but if not, that’s OK.