A workcamp… (…)

Very early on a Sunday morning of November (or may be December) 1958, in a cold and penetrating greyness, I move from the Quartier latin (Paris, France) towards Colombes and a workcamp of the weekend.
In Paris for this academic year, I have only been here for few weeks, and it has been the first time that I have venture into the suburbs of the capital, which I am discovering very much different than the pretty suburbs of my native America! The dilapidated houses and the passers-by, few and poorly dressed, add a note of sadness in the greyness and the cold. I hesitate and look for the umpteenth time the bit of paper on which I had scrawled the address of the workcamp... My comprehension of French is rather rudimentary and to make things easier, the telephone had crackled as a breeding of cicadas when I was registered for the workcamp. I still hesitate, the greyness converts suddenly into a drizzle. And what if I have the wrong address?
" Come on, I said to myself, your are not going to abandon now! After all, it's not your first time. ". Indeed certain workcamps of the weekend carried out with the Quakers the previous year in Roxbury, black ghetto of the periphery of Boston, had been trying both physically and morally, but had precisely incited me to take service (voluntary) again during my stay in Paris.

For someone freshly arrived, and without any contacts, find a workcamps organisation in Paris wasn't an easy thing at that time. Unlike what happened to the USA, Parisian faculties didn't have any orientation service concerning the social field, and the city of Paris didn't seem to have any information on the question… Judging from the reactions of my interlocutors, the voluntary service seemed to be a top secret subject, and even somewhat suspiciously exotic.
Finally almost in despair of cause I discovered the French Quakers who put me in contact with Jeunesse and Reconstruction which, not organising any weekend workcamps, gave me the telephone number of the SCI.
I end up finding my address at Colombes. For any welcome, the group chief scolds me: I was 15 minutes late and I didn't bring the " very necessary " rubber gloves (about which nobody had spoken to me, unless the cicadas ate the message). Then it puts to my hands a large sponge soaked with bleach (of which without gloves, I will have a memory - prickly - for 15 days) and adds on a somewhat curt tone, a new expression to my vocabulary : " at work ! "

The object of the workcamp : to clean thoroughly and then to repaint a sordid two bedrooms flat, occupied from an old lady who doesn't understand very well what happens to her, despite the visit of a responsible, a specialist on civil law. She even confess to a girl volunteer that she is a bit afraid of this yelling band which without too many precautions transport her things from one room to another.
Around noon, her face lights up by a smile when one of the boys flush out at the top of her wardrobe(" it's been at least fifteen years that I cannot go up on a chair ") a 1930's newspaper cutting in which figures in good place a photograph of her late husband.
During the rapid lunch have begun discussions which will animate the whole afternoon and about which the old lady doesn't understand a thing. The subject? The workcamps, of course! And I understand that the thorny questions on which we had endless discussions (and thus without any final response) in Roxbury have an at least transatlantic value.

Did we come to Colombes to achieve a manual task or to help on the social field? If we are limiting ourselves to cleaning and painting we are ignoring the humanist dimension of the workcamp, even more important in this specific case because the old lady, abandoned by her children for several years already, doesn't seem to have any emotional relation with anyone. But if we take the time to discuss with her and bring some warmth to her life we couldn't finish our task and return her two-bedrooms back to her, clean and repaint in smiling colours, at least not before a late hour. So, " work or do some chat "? The opinions on this dilemma differ.
I provoke myself, really involuntarily, a new brouhaha by asking, naively, if in France the State doesn't take on charge the old people and more generally the situations of distress to which voluntarism can only propose partial and punctual solutions, and even, in certain cases, amateurish.
Then comes up, inevitably (we are in full war of Algeria), the double question of the pacifism and the politicisation of the workcamps organisations, and of course, of the international civil service, in particular. This debate is the most animated.

When the following week, I described my Sunday adventures to some other students, both foreigners and French, they looked me with eyes wide opened, like a rare and somewhat ingenuous bird. Not that they ignored the social problems; but they found, as good intellectuals, that the solutions with these problems (in Colombes we had been concerned with town planning, ageing, with housing...) must be global and political. For them, this kind of acting, the kind that I had done and that I was going to do again several times during the following months, was of a distressing naivety, even of an unhealthy voyeurism!

However in a highly industrialized society, voluntary service participates to the re-establishment of a practice, and more deeply of a value, universal in time and space, whose permanence was only temporarily threatened by the advent of the industrial revolution: the personal participation in a community's mutual aid. It is called donkpé in Benin, Mingas in Ecuador, bayanihan in the Philippines and persists, in various forms although often undermined by the incursion of an unsuited and badly digested "modernization", common to almost all developing countries and even to a society which is considered to be already in the post-industrial era : the USA. Whoever saw the film "Witness" will remember the festive atmosphere which surrounds the construction, by a whole village, of a barn for one of its families. It is not a question of a completely unselfish service because the previous year, it was for another family that a barn was built, and the following year it is a third family that will benefit from such a service.
Everyone finds its interest there, but in a community spirit, by manual work, without the least commercial ulterior motive and in a festive atmosphere of solidarity. And that happens only a few kilometres from the town of New York, in 1984.

Admittedly the human devastations caused by industrial revolution have been partially counterbalanced by numerous charities in favour of the poor. However, charity isn't solidarity and it doesn't have the practical spirit which characterizes what I called the personal participation in community's mutual aid.

If it really constitutes an innate need, this kind of participation could only have disappeared for a short period of time, thus it was necessary to reappear. And it was inevitable to happen, in a highly symbolic place and in a moment when the industrialized world had just realised for the first time the horror of the technological war. On November 1920, in Verdun, a dozen of Swiss, English, Hungarian, Austrians, Dutch and... Germans (including two former soldiers) launched the first international workcamp of voluntary work. It had to be ended prematurely, after a few months of hard work of reconstruction, because some inhabitants regarded the presence among the volunteers of "enemies" with a suspicious look.

But the workcamp of Verdun marked the beginning of a new way to participate personally in the community's mutual aid with solidarity and practical spirit. (…)

If today's voluntary service is actually a new phenomenon, it expresses a tradition and carries values and practices as ancient as the humanity itself. The workcamp and other forms of voluntary service are to a large extent to our "global village" (from the Canadian scholar's Marshall McCluhan expression) what was to the African pre-industrial village the institutions of mutual aid and socialization mentioned below, with one slight difference that - unfortunately - the modern voluntary service is far away, very far away, from being a universal experience, from being a part of everyone's life.

Would a period of voluntary service be, by any chance, less helpful, less full of lessons, than the reading of Corneille or Kant? Would a question for the baccalaureate (yes, I said "the untouchable baccalaureate") about voluntary service realized by the candidate arouse an answer less revealing of the intelligence, the sensibility, of the practical or intellectual abilities of the candidate than a test on literature or philosophy?
And what about the wasted abilities of people to whom ageing - or other socio-economics factors - condemn to inactivity while France, as well as the world, is left with numerous unsatisfied needs? Of course, any generalisation of a formula witch is turned out to be appropriate for a reduced scale entails risks of uniformity and can lead to the distortion of the formula, deprived of its substance. We should therefore be very careful. But the game is worth the candle if it allows an innocent and non-bureaucratic volunteer to avoid a framework still - let's admit it - quite confidential in France nowadays. To believe that this generalisation is impossible comes to doubt about both the voluntary service itself and the enthusiasm and the solidarity of every human being.
Or do I dream? (…)

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Arthur Gillette carried out in 1961-1963 his civil service as a conscientious objector in the Secretariat of the Coordinating Committee for International Voluntary Service. He wrote a book called "One Million Volunteers. The Story of Volunteer Youth Service" where he shows how service has affected volunteers and the peoples with whom they work, and draws guide-lines for the future of international voluntary work. The book can be found on line: http://www.ourstory.info/library/5-AFSIS/Gillette/volunteersTC.html