Volunteers: The desire to help is a common bond
By Emily Churchman
LOHADA is a small Tanzanian-led organization based in Arusha. Our main project
is a temporary home and school for young disadvantaged children, called Camp
Moses, located in Moshono. One of the ways our organization funds itself is
through a paying volunteer program at this site. Most, but not all, of our
volunteers are young and white, and many are female. All of our volunteers come
with a desire to help out in some way with what they see as a worthy cause; but
they all have different ideas about what helping out and being in Tanzania will
entail. In seven months of coordinating our volunteers and watching them come
and go, I've seen that who they are and what they're looking for when they
submit their application often differs greatly from person to person. In turn,
these differences in perspective at the outset translate into differences in the
way they experience their time volunteering and their time in Arusha in general.
One of the biggest differences is time. People who come for three weeks or less
don't have time to get used to being dusty (or, as of late, muddy) all the time.
They don't learn Swahili beyond the basic greetings and commands to control the
children (they laugh when they first see the list of phrases we send out—stop
it, get off, don't hit, etc.—and they learn them all within a few days). They
see their stay at Camp Moses as a short stop usually at the start of a longer
African adventure; the children are a more meaningful but no less picturesque
attraction than the elephants in Ngorongoro and the dhows off Zanzibar.
Volunteers who stay for longer want to do something; they want to leave with the
feeling that the school has changed for the better in their time there and that
the closeness they feel to the children is reciprocated. They learn Swahili,
learn names, learn how to get the dirt off the soles of their feet with a brush.
And age matters too. In the past seven months, our youngest volunteer has been
19 and the oldest 70. The former devoted many of his evenings (and mornings
after) to his social life; the latter brought her own lunch every day in a
Ziploc bag because she was suspicious of the food cooked over a fire. Their ages
affected the experiences they had and what was important to them to get out of
their time with us. But both showed an easy, mutual affection with the children
as they played.
Perhaps the biggest difference among our volunteers is the utility they look for
in their experience. One came to stay for a month at the start of a 5-month
journey around Eastern and Southern Africa. He wanted a chance to learn about
the way of life of the people he would be traveling among and the daily
essentials of life here. He put his energies into following the routes into
experience that his acquaintances offered and found himself in private homes, at
a recording studio, and in front of an English class. Another volunteer came at
a turning point in her adult life and threw herself into personal relationships
and loving the children. Others have come to test out their vocation in Africa,
to get away from home, or just to have a good time.
I think that all of these volunteers have unique and invaluable contributions to
make, and I think that they are somewhat representative of all the volunteers
who at some point pass through Arusha. In conversation, when volunteers meet
each other, you can often hear them trying to tease these elements out. How long
are you here? What will you do when you go back? Is it your first time in
Africa? In the temporary and shifting society of volunteers, the differences are
there, but the desire to help is a common bond.
To find out more about LOHADA's activities, please visit
www.lohada.org .
|
