When people consider volunteering as an options and start researching the various options available to them, it is easy to forgot the host project and community who you will be impacting on. Ultimately, they should be at the centre of a volunteer experience, although this isn't always the case.
In 2008 Comhlámh did research examining the impact of volunteers on the host community. For more info click here.
Things to consider:
- Acknowledging our personal motivations for volunteering to our hosts is not only honest but also recognises what they have to give, and breaks out of the traditional and paternalistic relationship of the ‘helper and helped’;
- Being honest with those who host volunteer programmes opens up possibilities for working together and learning from one another;
- Working with the communities you go to help is vital. There are far too many volunteer and development projects all over the world which thought they knew what was best for a local community and simply got on with it without stopping to ask. This has produced some disastrous projects;
- Communicating, working with and learning from your host will all be things you will need to manage yourself in your everyday interactions;
- Travelling with the open minded attitude that you are ‘here to learn’ rather than the closed minded ‘here to help’ will make you ask the questions from which you learn, and not assume you always know the answers.
Furthermore, not only can you learn from those you meet, work with and seek out; you can also learn from your experiences, both the good ones and the bad ones. The following section aims to provide you with an idea of the kind of things which may happen to you while volunteering overseas. It is made up of the responses we received from former volunteers about the highs and lows of their time volunteering overseas. By reading this we hope that you put yourself in their positions and imagine how you would react. Hopefully, like many of the volunteers who took the trouble to write to us, you will learn from their experiences in a positive manner.