It’s true that when setting out for a trip you never know what to expect, especially if you are planning to visit very different cultures and countries from where you are coming from. It is also true that somewhere inside you, you carry Kavafi’s words… “it is the journey that matters and not the destination”. It is really hard to perceive this adventurous notion when, at first glance, it does not seem to apply to volunteerism. In volunteerism what is the destination? It cannot be even remotely defined, regardless of how much you read or researched the project you will be involved in, at least not until the project has been completed.
Looking back, I think my journey started many years ago when I realized that one of my missions on this planet was to volunteer my time in a suffering part of the world. Back then I didn’t really know why I wanted to be involved in volunteerism. Different readings had touched my altruistic side and I felt at some point I should become a responsible “citizen of this world”. My dream came true when I made the commitment to devote a month of my life to a troubled foreign place. When the time had come I signed up with an international organization and before I knew it I was on a plane and on my way to Kenya.
Upon arrival, it was interesting to meet other volunteers brought to Kenya for the same reasons I was there. The first few days, and before going to the community to work on our projects, we all shared time getting to know each other, playing games in the park of Nairobi and going through orientation, in preparation for the actual experience. Lots of things seemed strange at the beginning – why are playing games? We should really be getting more information about the specific problems of the area we are going to work in. It took a few weeks to realize that the games we played were in the context of building trust with the other volunteers – i.e., complete strangers we had just met and with whom we would have to work in perfect harmony to get the camp and the project going. Three days later, and while we’re still getting over the culture shock, we were all on our way to the village, a little community in western Kenya, close to lake Victoria.
After a good 8 hours on the bus we arrived in a town close to the village and then walked for half an hour to the community. All the fatigue and frustration evaporated the minute we took the last turn towards the school that was hosting us, only to see the whole community welcoming us, locals dressed in traditional outfits playing their music with their drums. Children were everywhere, running around, staring at us with such amazing energy. Smiling and playful, happy and curious at the same time. As we found out later, it was their first time to see white people! I could not help crying of happiness and fulfillment, as the choir was singing and the kids were running and dancing and laughing, glowing with happiness. I realized that my dream was at that very moment coming true. It was one of those moments when time freezes to enable you to realize what is actually happening.
This beautiful feeling lasted till the day after: the school had emptied two classrooms for the volunteers to sleep in. Although we were all coming from different parts of the world where a bed and running water was taken for granted, we happily set our sleeping bags on the dirt floor, hang our mosquito nets and got ready to go to bed. We had a little fire going outside in order to keep the “wilderness” away… which kept us up till late, gazing at the unbelievable African sky … numerous stars so bright, so many configurations, and there it was, the southern cross! And deep down in the village we could hear the drums playing. It was so fascinating, we all went to sleep thinking… my God, we really are in Africa!
Only to wake up the day after to the African reality. We got to spend time with the locals that explained to us the problems of their community: poverty, high birth rate, disease, unemployment, alcoholism. And the drums we heard the night before, that made the whole environment so mystique, were playing for a funeral. Unfortunately, the drums never stopped and were playing every night during our stay.
But we had to start our project right away. The reason for our presence there was to bring the community together and help them make bricks in order to build an extra two classrooms in the school. We were 15 volunteers from the US, Europe and other parts of Africa, and in the limited time of 3 weeks that were supposed to be there, it would have been impossible to make 3,000 bricks. The bricks were not the actual goal: bringing the locals together to work on the project was the actual goal. In other words we were trying to create a core, a new dynamic, so that locals would get more involved in the problems of their community and work together towards solving them in an organized and efficient manner.
We started the brick making right away. The community enthusiastically embraced the fact that a group of foreign people were there to help them, the least they could do was to show up at the work site and help us help them. It was such a gratifying feeling to see them dropping their daily routine and show up at the working site. At the end of the day we were all covered in mud but with a big smile on our face from joking and laughing and building friendships with the locals and their children.
My friend from Uganda, another volunteer I met at the camp, sent me the following piece after we completed the camp. His piece depicts in the most wonderful way the scene in the working site:
Mud, mud, mud time
Blacks becoming more black whites becoming black,
Mud all over their good fashioned clothes and shoes,
Children, women, men stretching their muscles,
Throwing their hands with hoes and spades in the air,
Mixing the mud, making bricks all day in the heat of the sun,
Excretion of sweats with that natural scent of their bodies,
A group of whites and blacks respecting and accepting each other.
Volunteerism very often involves physical work, usually hard work. Many times I thought I wish I could have a “powerful bug” to place inside the volunteers’ brains and actually find out what they are thinking while working. During those hours of silence, when everybody concentrates in their work, those are the actual hours of deep thinking, when you realize what brought you there, how different it is from what you expected, what are really the problems, how to make the best out of the experience, and how to really be of help even after the end of the camp.
I have to admit nothing was objectively easy during my experience in a work camp in Africa. Every little task was so difficult to achieve and took a lot of effort because we had no tools or means to work with. Our hands and our physical shape were the only means we had. We were actually living exactly like the locals. But the frustration built was not only because of lack of means to facilitate our everyday life, such as cooking, finding drinking water, cleaning etc. It was built mainly because the mentality of the locals initially seemed so dramatically different from ours. When discussing problems of the community and suggesting solutions or game plans of managing problems, it many times felt like we were talking to a thick wall that was impossible to get through.
Nevertheless, the bricks were made in hundreds every day. We somehow all pulled together and made this project happen impressively fast. The commitment was there from our side and it was definitely born in the local community as well. When talking to the locals at night we slowly started realizing that our mission there was flourishing. They would say: “how can we sit back and watch white people in the mud, all dirty, men and women, doing this for us, we should help”. This point became particularly interesting with respect to the women of the village. It was interesting to realize along the way the role of women in that society: engaged with taking care of their children and the elderly, they thought that the construction work we were doing was a man’s job. Until they saw the volunteers, men and women, working with the mud making bricks. That definitely not only made an impression on them but also became a big lesson to get over the social discrimination and do what they had to do for their children and community. Taking into consideration the big problem with male alcoholism in that area that renders the men of the society incapable of performing any tasks, the woman’s role becomes particularly important. Therefore, the achievement of getting them involved in the community shines even more.
Disease and deaths were very dark spots of the experience. Malaria, AIDS and lack of nutrition cost thousands of deaths per year in the area. And we really felt what the locals feel when somebody falls sick, i.e. helpless! When one of us, a volunteer from Uganda, got sick of malaria and he almost died, we felt helpless! The disease can be very severe although there is medicine to cure it. However, due to unemployment, people cannot afford a visit to the doctor, whatsmore, buy medicine. They therefore die. With our fellow volunteer, the problem was similar. Although he felt sick, and probably knew exactly what it was, he refused to go to the doctor knowing he could not afford it. Luckily the rest of us realized that we had to decide for him, we carried him to the doctor almost paralyzed from fever and exhaustion and the medicine administered saved his life. All the volunteers pooled money for his treatment and up to this day he e-mails me from Uganda wonderful pieces of his writing. This incident designates another big problem that we are facing in places like Africa: just because people do not have the means to survive does not mean that they become beggars and loose their dignity. There is still, even in those extreme conditions, immense amount of pride and self respect. Values like these in such extreme situations can only be admirable and give hope for the existing potential and furthermore the future of their countries.
Taken together, it is interesting to look back and identify the pattern in the way volunteers felt during the few weeks of our work in the particular region. The first week was along the lines of … “I want to help everybody in all the levels, I want to stay sleepless and do everything I possibly can to help these people with their serious problems”. The second week was along the lines… “I really don’t know where to begin, the problems are many and severe, and people don’t seem to understand our approach although they do speak English”. The third week was the revelation - by then we all had enough background to understand a lot of things about why the locals had the particular way of thinking, about the land itself, the weather, the sky, the disease, the religion, the witchcraft, their culture and tradition. By better understanding them after two weeks of living in the exact same conditions like they do, eating their traditional food and immersing in their world it was obvious what was needed. A slight helping hand to get them going because apparently the potential was there. Along this process we identified their potential leaders that if ever given the chance of getting proper education, they can go back and help their community stand on its own feet. We had endless conversations with young promising bright individuals, talked about education and how they would use it if given the chance to have one. It was such a beautiful experience to listen to even younger kids in the classrooms talking about how they want to become medical doctors, and layers and teachers and pilots. And their face would light up and they would be taken over by their dreams. They were all, subconsciously, asking to be given a chance, not a hand out. This by itself was a priceless conclusion that noone can perceive unless sharing life with these people. Those of us that saw all these different layers that shape that society, when leaving we knew that our experience in that community is a lifelong responsibility that none of us can turn their backs on. We all knew we would go back.
If I was to summarize what volunteerism taught me, I would simply say that I learnt so much more about people. I identified the lighter shades of things or strategies to better the part of the world I worked for, regardless of what I had read or thought about before. My sweat and my energy mingled with the locals’. I made children laugh or dream or learn. They, in turn, taught me a lot about how people are the same everywhere no matter what the skin color or the religion. I made friends with people from everywhere in the world. I was so close to the dream, I was holding it when holding a child’s hand!
In retrospect, and no matter how inspiring, writing about volunteerism is not an easy task: it is hard to put all the aspects of it’s complexity in some kind of order. Especially since the impact it has on each individual is also complex and it sometimes takes years to fully understand. But I thought I should at least try to write something over an experience that literally changed my view on many things in life, partly because by writing about it I relive the experience, but mainly because there is a slight chance that other people with the same outlook on life may get inspired. One thing I would like to clearly state is that volunteerism is an experience that makes you humble, it’s a long trip inside yourself and inevitably inside others. And these others are people that you would never have met unless you went looking for them. Volunteerism broadens your horizons and helps you slowly get over the little things that eat us up on a daily routine basis. Lastly, it helps us regain the imperatively wide overview of the world we live in.
The experience is priceless and it is out there for everyone. The impact your presence can have in someone’s life is hard to even begin to explain. I will personally never forget the women of that village and how strong they must have felt when they saw they can actually do whatever they have to do to support their community, regardless of social or sex discrimination. I will never forget the children playing and dreaming, how much they learnt from us and how much more they know is out there for them. Had we never had been there they would continue living in the darkness, far away from any kind of means of information dispatching, isolated from the world. At this point they know the volunteers that were in their village live somewhere on this planet and think about them. They are not alone because they can contact the organization or even us if they are in need. How much of a wind can this be under their wings?
Naturally, after praising volunteerism, it’s inevitable not to wonder: isn’t there some kind of paradox in volunteerism? do you volunteer for them or for yourself? The locals can be asked the same exact question because in a way they were volunteers as well. After a lot of thinking and discussions with people that shared similar experiences, I believe the answer lies in the middle. If you volunteer there is a drive inside compelling you to become a useful citizen of this world. A real citizen of the world. Once you have volunteered you begin to see the big picture. You help and somehow you are helped. You offer and somehow you gain. You touch and you are embraced. And you have this irresistible feeling that, although you are not in politics, you actually did something significant to heal the world.
