About volunteering

I ended up volunteering because I didn't get the summer job I wanted. I wanted to work on children's summer camps, it has been one of my dreams for a long time. It is because I loved going on summer camps as a kid, so I would love to bring the same fiiling forward. But unfortunately it is always so many young teachers-to-be wanting that same summer job, that it is very difficult to get the job. When I was informed not to have got the job, I thought what's next on my dream list. Volumteering was something I have also wished to try for some years already, so I decided I would try to fulfill that dream.

I did a lot of research in the internet, and I found out that most of the times you have to pay loads for the volunteering. For me it doesn't make any sense. For the first, a volunteer is giving his/her time for free, wanting to help. Why should I pay crazy amounts of money for helping? I say crazy amounts because many organisations would charge you hundreds or even thousands of euros or dollars for organizing a two-week volunteer experience. Something is wrong there, in my opinion. I think they have misunderstood the target group. People who would like to voulunteer are usually young people who do not have money. They would like to  give their work force to help, because that is the thing they have. Then older generations and/or rich people with huge incomes or savings, there we have the group who will donate money for good purposes. Donating makes them feel better, they can help with the money while they can take it easy or the opposite, work their ass off to make more money.

So, in my head it didn't make any sense paying loads for giving my work force to help. In other words, I wouldn't have the money. But I wasn't ready to give up my plan to volunteer. I started looking for free volunteering, which is by the way oretty difficult to find. I thought that it would be fair that the volunteer would get at keast free accommodation, if not food. Food would be okay to pay for, as you would buy food any way no matter where you were. And for accommodation, almost anything goes. I am not picky, I can adapt to pretty extreme circumstances if I need to.

I found some websites that would help you to find less expensive possibilities to volunteer, if not free. At the same time I got also the idea of asking around among people I know. I have many friends from other countries. I was lucky, because The first person I asked, my good Indonesian friend Steve, was willing and able to help me. He had some contacts, and sooner than I could ever imagine, I was emailing with the boss of Sukma Bangsa School. The boss was very welcoming to me from the first email, and pretty soon I found myself booking flights to get there. Yihaa!

As I have told you before, the people in Sukma Bangsa school were incredibly hospitable and welcoming. I felt like being part of the family. Volunteering however, turned out not to be something I had expected. Of course we had discussed beforehand in email, and I had understood that I could be assisting the teachers in the classes and maybe teach something from my country, like some language or dance or something. So I was expecting and hoping to be able to help somehow in in the classes, and at the same time get a look how the school works on the other side of the world. However, what I didn't know was that the school has actually finished for the semester when I arrived. The students were in the middle of the examination period and after that they had only classes in religion.

For me it meant that my volunteering turned out to be more just interacting with the students. Talking, playing, doing things with them. At first, I was kind of dissapointed that I could not help more. My Finnish working moral had expected and wished to really help and work there, like doing full work hours. In terms of my expectations, what I actually did was kind of making me feel lazy. And being treated like a queen there made my conscious even worse, I definately didn't want to make them do any extra effort for me. It took me about one week to get used to the idea that the best thing I could give them was just being there with them, talking with them and do all kinds of things together with them. I really got a little crisis in my head before I could understand that was really what they appreciated from me. Talking with the teachers and the head principal of the school helped. They kept telling me how important it is that they get volunteers from different cultures to the school. It is very important that the students get in contact and interact with people from other cultures, it will broaden their perspective of the world and they need to learn to respect and appreciate cultural differencies. As Aceh being a strictly islamic area, the locals really don't see people from other cultures too often, if ever. Getting crosscultural contacts and even friendship makes the students more motivated to learn English also. There is more reason to study it when you see you can actually use the language.

The head principal emphasized to me also, that he thinks that really the most important thing is building understanding and friendship over the borders, building positive connections world wide. Actually, being able to use and improve English language can also make the students dream bigger. When they see they can get understood in English, they start to believe in themselves more. Dreams of going someday abroad for studying or just travelling get more real. They can really start to believe they can make the dreams come true. It is not impossible. And realizing this is very important. That convinced me finally, I got over my crisis of not being able to give them enough and started understanding the meaning of crosscultural understanding and friendship. I had never thought talking and hanging out with students during different kinds of activities could count for volunteer work, but now I do. I really want to make the students dream and believe in themselves :)