From hospice to Olympiad: Girls on volunteer work
Volunteer work in the world is becoming more popular: people are willing to help others and the planet without getting anything in return. We recently told you what you need to be prepared for if you decide to work on a voluntary basis, and today we turn to practice. We asked friends of girls who worked in different programs and in volunteer organizations about their experiences and what was most remembered.
I have been a volunteer of the Vera Hospice Support Foundation for a little over a year now: helping the Children's House with Beacon hospice. His task is to take care of the quality of life of the terminally ill child and his family. In order to become a volunteer, you need to fill out a questionnaire on the site, have an interview, instruction and practical training. Any volunteer helps at the outreach activities first, and then, if desired, after coordinating with the coordinator, he can begin to communicate directly with the child and help his family. We also had a very interesting lecture about children's diseases: they told why the wards look and behave in a certain way and so on.
The foundation's volunteers work in various directions: you need to take medicines, then get a certificate from the clinic for the mother, because she is alone with the child and cannot leave the house, then be a translator for a foreign guest at a medical conference. I mainly help at events. The hospice has a lot of them: for example, excursions for children to the fire department, clubs for moms and dads, trips to the pool and much more. Most often, my task is to look after the ward or his healthy brothers and sisters. Every month the hospice arranges something like a party. A volunteer is attached to each child for this day. They give out musical instruments to everyone, we swing the children on the bedspread, play with sand or dry beans.
Watching wards is always the hardest. Because of their diseases, some children lag far behind in development, react badly to the world around them. Some do not walk at all; they cannot take objects in their hands. Being close to them, you are as concentrated as possible: you follow the posture of the child, his movements, facial expressions, trying to catch the mood. And if it seems that something is wrong, call his mother or doctor. You get very tired of this constant stress.
It's nice to know that you can do something really important. I can spend only a couple of hours with the child or take the bouquet to the ward’s mother and congratulate him on his birthday, and for a family in such a difficult situation, when the child is mortally ill, this means a lot. After all, if a child cannot be cured, it does not mean that he and his family cannot be helped. It is possible and very necessary. And as a volunteer you are a little involved in this.
I did a lot of volunteering during the FLEX US student exchange program in 2010-2011. At the end of the year, I was even awarded the Barack Obama Medal for the number of hours worked (more than 300 hours in nine months!). I was engaged in a variety of things. Often I went with my host family to help at charity marathons. Usually, the races start at 10 o'clock in the morning, you had to be in place for a couple of hours to put the equipment in, to register all the participants, and to collect everything after the end. I had to get up at four in the morning on Sunday and a few hours to go from my small town to the venue of the event. I remember an elderly couple in a half marathon, which walked the whole distance on foot - no one left until they were the last to cross the finish line. At such events, usually a lot of people work for free - it helps to save on the organization, so the money ultimately goes to those who really need it.
Often we helped at school events: cooked and sold food. There was still a lot of one-time work. For example, they helped to clean the local museum, in which only one supervisor worked. Once they gathered on a big Saturday work day before the city, they put things in order on the streets - in the USA there is no separate service in small settlements that is responsible for cleaning, usually people do correctional work or volunteers. Such small actions cannot be carried out if you do not know your neighbors.
I would gladly arrange a work day in a park near my house in Moscow, but, unfortunately, I don’t even know who could be interested in my area. Still completely discourages this possible paperwork. Once I participated in the bloggers against the garbage community work day in my native Stavropol - the impression, frankly, was not the most pleasant. Activists-students who were not very interested in doing this were driven there, and besides me only the organizers knew about the action. I also volunteered for the Olympics in Sochi, but in the end I changed my mind after the preparatory program - most of the participants just wanted to go to the Olympics for free and didn’t even think about really helping.
With FLEX alumni, we sometimes get together, do something together. I love our trips to the Losiny Island Reserve - we help to bring the forester’s house in order in front of the children's summer camp. For me, volunteering, in the first place, is helping yourself and your surroundings, and not a way to show everyone how well done you are.
A year ago, I came across an article on the volunteer program. Although she was very inspiring, I thought that I would never decide on this myself. But after six months, I already bought tickets, and in early July I flew to Nepal to teach English to girls at the monastery. It was a very important trip for me: for the first time in my life I flew alone so far and did not know what to expect, what exactly I would have to do. A month before departure, I began to prepare: I read about local traditions, religion, the difficulties faced by tourists, looked for materials for classes with children and watched a YouTube video about girls traveling alone.
The monastery was located high on a mountain, surrounded by jungles and corn fields - the air there was incredibly clear, despite the proximity of dusty and noisy Kathmandu. There was no internet, no hot water, no dining table, so we ate on the floor of a huge veranda overlooking the city. Every day everyone woke up with the first sounds of the service, at 5:30 in the morning, had breakfast and went to class. There are four classes in the monastery: the first - for girls 5-12 years old, two middle and senior - for girls 17-19 years old. Most of the lessons consisted of attempts to explain new words, romps, and sometimes stories about life in a monastery. Of the fifty students, a foreign language was understood and could somehow speak about five, of which only one knew the language well enough to tell us about some interesting customs and translate the stories of other girls.
Before the trip to Nepal, I had no teaching experience, but I was lucky: for the first ten days I taught lessons in tandem with a German woman who had previously taught in a Chinese school. Every week new volunteers came and offered new ideas for classes. Usually in the evening, when all the children went to bed, we sat on the veranda for a long time, drank tea and discussed cultural differences. I miss all the girls, even though they asked me how I survive in the winter and how many glasses of vodka I drink per day.
Working with children when you yourself still feel like a child is not easy. It is even more difficult to work with students who barely understand you and are not quite ready to learn English. But I never regretted the decision to go and finally felt like I had matured.
I went to England for a year as a volunteer when I was 24, having spent almost a whole year looking for the project, all sorts of interviews, collecting the necessary documents and endless waiting. I don’t remember exactly how I learned about EVS (European Voluntary Service, or European Volunteer Service), but I realized that this is the best option for me. What is good about EVS is that all projects are funded by the European Union, and the volunteer is compensated for the costs of tickets and a visa, arrange insurance and pay out of pocket money. There is a huge database of projects for all countries where the future participant independently searches for the program and contacts the host organization. The choice is simply huge - there is where to roam.
Since at that time I firmly believed that working with children was my vocation, the project selected an appropriate one. As a result, I stopped at the organization of UMSA in the city of Bath. There, I worked as an assistant in kindergartens and in local extended schools. Later you could try your hand at the UMSA fitness club and in a cafe in nearby Bristol. I never decided to go to the fitness club (it was boring there), but I happily tried working in a cafe - an interesting experience! I was very lucky with the project: I lived in the very center of an incredibly beautiful English city, we had a great team, interesting work and, as it turned out, I and three other volunteers from my organization had better housing and material conditions compared to where other EVS volunteers lived in England.
I can not say that during that year I had to face some global problems. Rather, there were some emotional experiences, when the initial euphoria had already passed, friends and relatives are far away, there is still no snow in the winter and I want more free time and money to travel around the country. In general, I am extremely happy that I had the opportunity to get such a colossal experience of living in another culture, to get acquainted with a bunch of people from all over the world and see what I really can do.
Someone goes to church, someone goes to the gym, and I go to the shelter to help the dogs. This work combines everything: from hellish torture without sleep for weeks to immense happiness. I am connected with shelters for five years. When I was still a teenager, I dragged the kitten to my home, but allergies and my parents didn’t take pity on me, so I had to urgently look for a house for him.
Now I am helping everyone - from small home-keeping to state-owned nurseries, but closely related to ZooShchit. There, I cook porridges, clean, walk with dogs, do procedures for them, take home animals to overwork sick animals, take pictures and attach all wards, post ads on them on various sites. Nobody forces me to do this, I really like to do it, although sometimes it is scary and difficult. Very often there are situations when they call and say to us: “Oh, there are a few puppies in a box that are dying, I can't take it myself, come soon, take it.” You come, pick them out of some trash, but half are already dead, the second is at the last gasp. And you fight for their lives to the last. The chance that someone else will survive is one in a hundred. But where without naive hopes in this matter?
There are a thousand reasons in my life that make other people get rid of their pets: I live in one-on-one with careless co-workers, I have an allergy, I don’t have a steady income, I don’t have the time and energy and I want to have a different-eyed husky In short, I am really more comfortable with animals than with people. To see the grateful eyes of his charges is happiness.
This summer I had the opportunity to participate in the organization of one of the most impressive sporting events of the year - the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. I always wanted to go to Brazil, look at the statue of Christ on the mountain and dance salsa. I dreamed to look at the Olympic Games "from the inside", to find out how it all looks live, and not on a TV or computer screen. Of course, I was always interested in how such large-scale projects are organized, because not only athletes and organizers work at the Games, but also volunteers, who were more than seventy thousand this year. In general, it would be foolish to miss this opportunity.
I applied for participation in about a year and a half. It is necessary to go through several stages of selection: first consider your profile, then you pass tests for knowledge of languages, and then an online interview in English. I had never participated in something like this before and I had very poor experience on a voluntary basis. It turned out that volunteering is not troublesome, but very, very interesting.
I received a lot of emotions, met a huge number of new people from different countries and working in completely different areas and loved sports. I was assigned to the interpreters department, it was my responsibility immediately after the competition to translate the speech of the athletes for Olympic television. In the first days, of course, I was a little worried, I did not immediately recall the appropriate words, I forgot something. But over time I got used to it and wanted to work more and more, because it became really interesting: I communicated with athletes, their coaches, journalists. It was unforgettable!
Working as a volunteer helps to become a more open person - you learn to work in a team, in one team, and help others. She taught me to react quickly in emergency situations when there is no time for thinking and you just need to make a decision, right here and now. The main thing that the Olympic Games gave me was communication. Volunteering is a great opportunity to talk with different interesting people, learn something from them, tell something about us, and at the same time pull up English.
I think these Olympic Games became the starting point for my volunteer activities. Having tried once, you really get a taste. I have already applied for participation in the Winter Olympics in Korea and am looking forward to the invitation.
I went to a two-week volunteer program in 2013. The place chose at random from the project database on three criteria: Italy; so it was not exhaustingly hot in early July and sleep so that it was necessary not in tents in the forest. So I ended up in a village in the Alps between Milan and Turin. After the two-week project ended, I still lived in the house for a month with long-term volunteers and helped them.
On the first project, we helped residents to decorate the town and its surroundings. Places that could attract tourists were put in order: for example, they cleared mountain trails suitable for trekking, removed huge boulders left over from the glaciers several thousand years ago. They restored the old road, painted benches and wooden railing of bridges, carved out of wood and nailed up notice boards.
Then I participated in two other projects. One was engaged in the volunteers who came for a year. It was necessary to support the newly opened camp site: to meet guests, do the cleaning, prepare breakfast. Another project was cultural-historical: we cleared the trails of the partisans who participated in the Italian Resistance, followed their routes, stopping at the monuments. They showed us a small museum of the Resistance, and one evening they invited a 90-year-old former intelligence officer who told us about his war with tears in his eyes. Volunteers placed participants, cooked food, made up programs, and also each of the foreign volunteers prepared a report on partisan movements in their countries.
Most of all I remember communication with the locals, with whom I became friends. Here, of course, knowledge of Italian helped me a lot. It was the real Italy that no tourist sees. Nobody speaks English there, but people over forty still speak a dialect among themselves, there is not a single hotel and almost no shops, people look at strangers with surprise. I also remember the atmosphere in the volunteer house: there you feel that you are united with other good things in common. All of you are here only because it is interesting and necessary for you, you have one goal and absolutely no need to prove or show anything to anyone. You just do as much as you can.
It's hard for me to say about the minuses - they were not there. From the insignificant - it was inconvenient to move, because the buses did not go to our villages at all. Every time, to get to the store or station, you had to ask someone to give you a lift. But if everyone was busy, then they had to walk about two hours or hitchhike. It is important to remember that you choose an annual project from home and you cannot get to know in detail the people and the place where you are to live. I found the period when the volunteers were there for only the second month, and saw how psychologically difficult it was, despite the fact that the people and the atmosphere were very warm. I think I would not dare to go for a year as a volunteer to an unfamiliar place.
Photo: Coprid - stock.adobe.com, zneb076 - stock.adobe.com, Diana Taliun - stock.adobe.com, terex - stock.adobe.com, exopixel - stock.adobe.com