Being a Volunteer
It’s been a while since my last post unfortunately, work was busy and then we left for Addis for a week. Jen will write up a post on what happened in the last few weeks (of which quite a bit occurred) as I tend to miss important details. So instead I’m going to waffle on about some of my final impressions of Ethiopia and probably say what I have already said before on this blog.
Firstly though I have immensely enjoyed my time here in Harar and feel I have learned a lot and grown as a person. The people I have met here have been great and it’s been fun immersed in another culture for so long. From a personal point of view I don’t feel my time has been wasted.
I do feel that volunteering is well worth the experience as long as you don’t expect to make much of a change. Its not that the work you do isn’t valuable, or that the people you work with don’t appreciate your efforts, it’s because you are free.
When the country has to pay for its specialists such as the American lecturers or the Chinese road builders these expats are used fully and locals take away learned experiences because they have paid for that experience. However when someone is free, the impetus to use that person fully and learn from them isn’t there. If they improve something or provide something great, if they don’t, so what – they were free anyway.
To me volunteering is still the best way to provide support to a country and the best way for DFID (Department for International Development) to utilize its money. Just giving away money and resources is certainly not the right way to develop a country and these countries do need support. However volunteering will have a high failure rate and just will not be as effective as private enterprise will be in pure development terms.
Speaking purely from an Ethiopian viewpoint volunteers need to be better placed and the approach more targeted. The current scattergun method leaves too many volunteers without enough support and therefore wasted money. I don’t want to be too critical of VSO Ethiopia here, I do honestly believe that with their remit and scope and their resources they do the best they can. The backup I have received from them has been great. However should this placement in Harar have occurred? I have largely been working on my own here and although I have worked with schools and provided lots of training will my efforts be continued when there is no volunteer next year. Basically no, so have I really achieved much in a developmental sense?
Really it’s my fault that I am slightly disappointed. I came out here with a little ‘I’m going off to save the world’ mentality when clearly all the signs and even the training I received said otherwise. VSO’s ethos is that development is really slow baby-steps up a steep hill and in that sense I could never had made the impact I truly wanted.
Looks like I will have to get my ‘saving the world’ kicks from somewhere else!
June 11th, 2009 at 8:20 am
Thanks for the useful info. It’s so interesting