I can recall first bringing up VSO’s inability to make use of the hundreds of worldwide blogs almost five years ago.
I was in a volunteer Conference in Hoi An and volunteers were being asked to provide details of their experience for publication to aid new volunteers and those signing up.
I knew most of my colleagues kept a blog and I suggested instead why just not put them on a list and they could be accessed and contacted as needed.
Probably just to appease me, a sheet of paper was handed round for us all to write our URLs on and then…nothing was ever done about it.
Later when they needed pictures for posters and websites this time I suggested utilising Flickr. We could all be given log in details and could all upload pics and it would have the added value of us seeing what each was up to, enabling us to share pics with back home AND the programme office could have their pick of the best ones.
Again it was never acted upon.
Spool forward a few years and here we are in 2009 and there has been some blogging breakthroughs – in particular the visually uninspiring on-site official efforts. However the gold mine of what must surely be hundreds and hundreds of blogs remain unmined.
I’m moved to blog this (yet) again because this week two blogs turned up in my RSS trawl. One was only recently posted whereas the other is from a couple of years back (it was a new comment that made it pop up).
But they show the extremes of VSO life and indeed of expat life and they address probably the key issue for volunteers in determining what posting is best for them and what can be handled.
They are also a reminder that, in putting their faith in social media, organisations like VSO have to unlearn the PR lessons and decide that while they can continue to promote the good it isn’t unreasonable to acknowledge the bad.
Actually, for many people “the bad” is part of the experience. Often it’s “the bad” that makes the experience. Hopefully in the snippets below – from a Capital-based Canadian saying goodbye to a big city post in Sri Lanka – and a Brit suffering in rural Bangladesh – you will see what I mean:
Rural Brit:
The day was slightly tarnished though by being constantly harassed and stared at. I’m beginning to realise what it must be like to be a really famous footballer or film-star, because everywhere I go the whole street turns it head and watches me, whether I’m cycling, eating, being ripped off in the market, picking my nose.
Capital Canadian:
This weekend was lovely. On Friday night, VSO held a cocktail party to introduce the new country director, Patrick, to volunteers, partners, funders and friends of the organization. …The party was the perfect opportunity to say goodbye to the volunteers and partners … all in a nice social setting with food and free wine! After the VSO event, many of us headed to the Cricket Club…
Rural Brit:
In Srimangal a few months ago me and Georgia got followed on our bikes by six kids for almost two miles. We thought we’d try and bore them out, so stopped by the side of the road and just stood and said nothing for two minutes. They all stopped about a metre away from us and peered at us for two minutes as well. I get asked ‘Hi how are you? Your country? Your name? What you doing Bangladesh?’ about 20 times a day – genuinely – and so in Sylhet when me and Luke are out together the sight is rarer than a driver giving way.
Capital Canadian:
I headed over to Zoe’s, where she, Ann-Sofie and I drank wine and got ready for a charity fashion show and ball that night. Colombo has lots of balls, none of which I’ve ever attended because the tickets cost five days’ allowance for me. Zoe and Ann-So bought me a ticket to this one though as a goodbye gift, and they brought a bunch of their dresses for me to try (it never occurred to me to pack a fancy dress for this experience). The night was an absolute blast from start to finish and I’m so glad I got to do it. The fashion show was good, the food was yummy and we got gift bags to take home.
Rural Brit:
The main reason for going… was to have a little farewell party for Luke. He was going to get another six-month working visa to stay here, before going to America to work there in July, but totally unexpectedly, his visa wasn’t renewed and he had to leave Bangladesh on Monday. This now means that I’m the only non-Asian person and native English-speaker in an area of at least 12,600 sq km, probably more, and thus will now be even more famous in Sylhet, where tourists can now come and see a white man. There are two Japanese development workers here until May, but as far as I know, that’s it. Everyone else who permanently lives here is ethnically Bengali.
When I was organising my VSO placement, the one thing I specifically said to my placement advisor was that wherever I was going, I didn’t care how beautiful it was, I didn’t want to be on my own.
Capital Canadian:
On Sunday… we went for a hangover breakfast at Park Street Mews. It was delicious. The bacon was actually salty! …In the late afternoon, I went for my second good-bye do: high tea at the Galle Face Hotel. I had thrown out an invitation to the VSOs and a couple of other low-income friends and, much to my delight, several people accepted. In all, there were eight of us and it was just one of those times when everyone clicks. It was a really lovely afternoon of getting to know each other (or getting to know each other better), enjoying a gorgeous all-you-can-eat meal and talking at length about scones (apparently the proper pronunciation is “skons”.) It made me sad that I wouldn’t get to spend more time with these folks.
Rural Brit:
In our global world 21st century world though, I’m aware that this is an anthropological privilege to be able to be somewhere that still hasn’t been distorted and or ruined by ‘Western’ culture and standards of living. That doesn’t mean that I like it, because I enjoy sharing experiences with people face to face, not just in writing, but I certainly appreciate it and am going to try and make the best of what is a rare situation. I’ve no choice, after all.
Capital Canadian:
In the evening, Zoe, Ann-So, Naomi and I went for goodbye number three: a goodbye dinner at Summer garden. They’d never been there before (it’s low rent, but good) and they were happy I’d introduced them to the place. We all enjoyed ourselves again with lots of laughs. I will miss them. Zoe’s Australian, Ann-So is Swedish and Naomi is British. One of the sad things about saying goodbye here is you’re not likely to see people in this context again or, possibly, in any context together again.
Tomorrow (which is actually today, since the sun is now up) is going to be a busy one. Lots of last minute running around followed by my final goodbye: a drop-in drinks event at the Cricket Club. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone one last time.
It would be easy to make judgements about both volunteers simply based on these snippets. The truth is that, a quick look through their blogs, and you’ll find that neither had it easy. Both faced challenges and both learnt a great deal and hopefully taught just as much.
I received an email from a prospective volunteer this week who asked me about my experiences as she weighed up a posting that had been suggested to her. I said go for it but later learned she felt that it wasn’t right and she was sufficiently clued up, because she had done her research, to make that call.
Recently I also received an email from a couple who were also headed out soon. He was going to volunteer and she was going to find work. Was that possible? They weren’t married – would that be an issue? Africa or Asia? Rural or capital city?
I advised them where I could and tried not to suggest one continent or one place over another – I just ran them through some of the challenges they may face in each.
I’m happy to do it – I feel like I have two incredible experiences with VSO and its the least I can do.
I believe that blogs are the best source of information if you want to find out about living anywhere – and it’s those moments when the blogger lets their guard down and tells it like it is where you learn the most. My experience with a steady trickle of volunteer emails suggests that the new recruits are already primarily looking to blogs for their pre departure briefings.
On a recent trip to VSO in London I met a number of the staff, none of which had ever been volunteers. They simply weren’t qualified to advise in these areas. Only volunteers are.
While for VSO promoting bloggers as a source of info is a leap of faith from the culture of PR, it mirrors what we want from our own grass roots partners in developing countries – transparency, honesty, reporting, dialogue etc etc.
And going back to that Rural Brit – he’s home now, with a job and all appears to be working out. There’s no doubt he had a tough placement but he stuck it out.
I’ll leave you with his final words because he obviously took so much from the experience and the adversity and it put “the bad” in context. No volunteer has a perfect life, but very very few have regrets:
Another tune that has been something of a soundtrack for me in Bangladesh is‘Factory’ by Martha Wainwright, a beautiful lilting lament that begins with the couplet “These are not my people I should never have come here”.
But I’ve found as the last year has gone on that whilst I could never say that I am Bangladeshi, there’s no reason to think that different people can’t take pleasure in the same life. I’m separated either through my education, upbringing, culture, wealth, health, spiritual or temporal beliefs from the vast majority of Bangladeshis, yet there’s much less of the artificial barriers and constraints that separate people in the West.
I’ve felt obviously completely distinct from Bangladeshis over the last year, but also strangely in solidarity with the country here, I think because there are so few places to hide. You get swept up and embraced whether you like it or not, but if you can manage to stop struggling, abandon your own lenses of perception and accept that those lenses are useless here – perception is irrelevant, the country has one layer, one screen that everyone is pressed against to make up the pixels of a bigger picture of Bangladesh. That envelops everybody; it’s a shared common space. It’s a very crowded space, uncomfortable at times, but its one layer.
