By Gus Caje-Medina
Volunteering is something I have always enjoyed, ever since I was at school and used to help the younger pupils at an after school club. For me, in a world where most people seem to be largely concerned with pursuing their own selfish goals, there is something really amazing about giving up time to improve the lives of others. I have worked part-time for most of my professional life, and have balanced it with a variety of volunteering placements. When my work at a local school for the blind came to an end and I started considering my next move, I began to think about the possibility of voluntary work abroad.
This new stage of my volunteering career appealed because I felt it would be a fantastic opportunity to experience a different culture and learn about another part of the world – something I may never have had the opportunity to do otherwise. Even though I knew my time as a volunteer at home was put to very good use, I felt that there were areas in developing countries where I might be able to make even more of a difference than I had done here. As a lot of my volunteering experience was in working with children, I focussed my search for voluntary work abroad on placements which enabled me to work with children. It was eye-opening just browsing through the volunteering opportunities that were available, and got my thinking about the millions of children worldwide who are in need of help just to achieve a decent standard of living.
I lost my mother at quite a young age, so I felt particularly drawn to volunteer placements with children who had lost parents, and orphanages in particular. I had always wanted to see South Africa, and with the football world cup coming up, the media coverage of the country and all its issues had really sharpened my interest. I therefore narrowed my search to find orphanages in South Africa that were looking for extra help. For a country very much in the grip of HIV and AIDS, there was an unsurprisingly large number of young people who had lost parents due serious illness, and the organizations that looked after these children were clearly finding it a real struggle to provide the care and attention they needed.
I arrived to find what seemed like an adapted version of a boarding school, with only a fraction of the money behind it. A matron-type figure cooked dinner every morning for the sixty children, got them out of bed and ready for school, and cleaned their bedrooms and dormitories every day. With so much physical work to be done, one of the gaping holes in the work of this fantastic organization was finding enough time to give these children the emotional support and love that they would have got from their parents. For me to fill this role would perhaps have been slightly counter-productive, as when my two month volunteer period came to an end, I would have to leave the children behind, severing any bonds that had been formed and causing them to leave another person they had become close to. Instead, I took on all the cooking duties, which freed up the matron to pay the children the emotional attention they desperately needed.
This voluntary work abroad was a very different experience from anything I had done at home. The very scale of the care needed for the young people of South Africa was quite a shock, and I was just happy to be able to make a minor difference to these children’s lives in the small time I spent there.
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