Volunteering

Have you ever carried a full bucket of cement on your head?  Or watched wild tarantulas and snakes just going about their daily business?  Ever walked along the treetops of a rainforest, or bought fresh fish from on top of a woman’s head?  If not, you need to get yourself into volunteering!

You may have guessed from the mixture above that these things happen to have been experiences of my own (or maybe you thought that I was practising for a job interview with Thomas Cook, but either way, it enticed you into reading this far, didn’t it?)  The truth is, yes, I have just returned from a 2 month trip to Ghana, helping to build an Orphan’s and Vulnerable Children’s Centre.  I apologise now for the innumerable clichés that will undoubtedly manage to sneak their way into this article (through no fault of my editor, of course), but the simple fact is that it is hard to write about volunteering without treading on the toes of the million other or so people who have ever enthused about it.  Will I just get the clichés out of the way right now, so that we can get on with the real part of the article?  Alright then: ‘Volunteering-and-travelling-are-really-amazing-and-is-one-of-the-best-experiences-you-can-ever-ever-have-and-omg-its-so-good-you-should-do-it-now-while-you-are-still-young-and-it’s-great-for-your-cv-too!

And so it goes on.

Seriously though, getting yourself involved in something that will lead you to travelling or working abroad is probably one of the best things you can do with your spare time, especially when grown up things like mortgages and council tax are no concern of yours.

I could spend days telling you all the right things to do – act dedicated, plan your trip ahead of time, save up so that you can have the time of your life etc – but there are a couple of things that need to be seriously thought through before you put yourself out into a big world that you may not understand as well as you think you do.

Firstly, beware the rose-tinted glasses.  Charity work is never, and is not meant to be, absolutely bullet-proof; you cannot help every cause at the same time and there will always be certain cases when what you are doing seems to  be not worth the effort, or worse, completely pointless.  Don’t be surprised when you come into contact with people who are less than impressed with your project; I was once fundraising for the Ghana project I mentioned before when a lady gave me an extremely bad look and told in a stern voice that I should be raising money for people in Haiti, hadn’t I heard about the terrible earthquake?  I assure you that yes, I had heard about it, in fact I had heard a huge amount about it.  The point is, no one can split themselves seven ways to try and cover as many disasters as possible, and it is important to be well aware that everyday thousands of ‘terrible’ things happen, and you cannot fundraise for every single one of them.

It is very easy when you are giving time and dedication to a cause that you become so involved in it that your view of many things, most importantly yourself, begins to change.  Try to keep an open mind, and think of yourself in a broad context, so that you can stop your head from inflating, which, lets face it, everyone’s head has a tendency to do.  This is not suppose to be a put-down – spending time with sick children in hospital does not make you Mother Teresa, but it has the potential to make you a good person.

It is also important to be aware of your motivations for what you are doing and have confidence in them.  I struggled when I encountered people who were cynical about charity work, and started thinking negatively about the work I was doing, until it occurred to me I had to remember that my own opinions about my work were the most important.  The opinion I used to struggle with most was what we might call the ‘there’s no such thing as selfless good deed’ school of thought.  At first I thought that this meant I should struggle to have a difficult and bad trip, almost as if that would make it more legitimate.  When I finally became comfortable with the thought that no charitable act was selfless, I was able to give a huge amount more to the project, because the feeling of satisfaction or fun I had while doing it didn’t bother me anymore.  The people I met over the course of the project changed my life as much as I changed theirs, and there is nothing wrong with being perfectly able to accept that as a consequence of volunteering.  The great thing about volunteering abroad, is its very ability to allow both sides to benefit; if only one half benefits, then the imbalance would suggest that something has gone wrong!

If you are thinking of volunteering for a project abroad (and if you’re not, why not?!) then please don’t allow me to put you off for pointing out some of the pitfalls!  There are thousands of different things going on around the world for whatever kind of trip you want to go on, and whatever previous experience you might have.  And whatever the opinions of yourself and everyone around you, if you want to do something that allows you to make a difference, then you’ll be able to do that while getting loads of benefits from it.  I love volunteering because it the simplest equation in the world (and I hate equations) : whatever you put in -  dedication, passion, fun – is exactly what you and the people around you get out of it.  The kind of thing you should look out for when volunteering is neatly summed up in this little pearl of wisdom:

‘Remember, people will judge you by your actions, not your intentions.  You may have a heart of gold – but so does a hard-boiled egg’ – anonymous

I would have put it in earlier in the article, but then you would have got the point before it gave me the chance to gossip about my ‘omg-it-was-so-amazing-I-had-an-awesome-time’ volunteering trip, and that would have been a negative development for us all I feel.

JLH