In 1945, International Voluntary Service workers rebuilding the French village
of Ecurcey.
|
What
volunteers bring is the human touch, the individual, caring approach that no government
programme, however well-meaning and well-executed, can deliver.
Edward
James Olmos, American actor (1947-)
|
The
emancipation from colonial rule of many countries led to the birth of a myriad of
local voluntary organizations. |
Once
closely tied in with community traditions, volunteering’s expansion has been driven
by an internationalist spirit. Today, it attracts a wide array of enthusiasts, including
those on the sidelines
Sorin Hurdubae, 38,
lives in Paris and works several hours a week at Echanges-Solidarités-Territoires.
Known by its French play-on-words acronym EST (“East”), this NGO focuses on cooperation
with the countries in transition of Eastern Europe—including Sorin’s native Romania.
Sorin is but one of several part-time volunteers of different nationalities without
whom EST could not survive, much less prosper. His desire to “lend a helping hand”
is echoed by millions of people around the world, making volunteering a centrepiece
of today’s social landscape.
Historically, not “to lend a helping hand” would have been an aberration. Virtually
all pre-industrial societies had more or less formal communal mutual assistance institutions.
Some survived well into the 20th century, others still exist, chiefly in the countryside.
In Mali for example, a practice known as ton obligated youth to take part in community
tasks as part of their rite of passage into adolescence. In Ecuador, the Quichua
people continue to organize mingas, whereby each household in a community donates
labour for a specific local project. In India, the notion of shramdan—offering voluntary
labour—continues to mobilize people for rural projects, from road building to literacy
training. More generally, almost all the world’s religions include a dimension of
social responsibility towards those in need, a responsibility often intricately linked
to salvation or other forms of spiritual advancement.
Friendship
after war
In
European societies however, good will lost some of its pre-eminence with the industrial
revolution, the rise of modern states and the onslaught of money as the main medium
of exchange. At the same time, international movements began to emerge, notably the
World Alliance of YMCAs, the first international youth NGO, formed in the 1860s.
In the U.S., its volunteers proved instrumental in helping immigrant populations
from Europe to settle.
After the devastation caused by World War I, coming to the aid of the less fortunate
found renewed expression. Volunteering became a more structured endeavour, often
seen as a means of building friendship among young people from different European
countries. In 1920, the first international voluntary work camp was organized in
Esnes, a village near Verdun (France), an area ravaged by the horrible battle that
took some one million lives during the war. An initiative of the International Fellowship
of Reconciliation, the camp helped rebuild farms and other physical infrastructure,
and, significantly, included volunteers who had been enemy soldiers in the Great
War. It also led to the launching of a still active and creative NGO, Service Civil
International (SCI—International Voluntary Service).
Prefiguring North-to-South programmes such as the British Voluntary Service Overseas,
the U.S. Peace Corps and the German Deutsche Entwicklungsdienst by a quarter of a
century, SCI sent the first recorded team of long-term volunteers from what were
not yet called “industrialized” to “developing” countries—Europe to India—in 1934.
Meanwhile, as economic depression spread, state-run work camp organizations often
sprung up in countries as far apart as the U.S. and Bulgaria to give the jobless
a chance to learn a skill by volunteering for conservation and physical infrastructure
projects.
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, national and international teams of volunteers
once again contributed much to rebuilding Europe. To cite just one example, many
of the stones and bricks that create the charm of today’s Old Warsaw were lovingly
laid by volunteers from several countries.
But a new world was also in the making, in which volunteering was to play its part.
The United Nations was born, with its commitment to promote peace, social progress
and understanding between peoples —ideals close in spirit to much volunteering in
the inter-war years. In 1948, UNESCO took the lead in involving itself with volunteering
by convening the First Conference of Organisers of International Voluntary Workcamps.
The gathering created the NGO now known as the Coordinating Committee for International
Voluntary Service, which helped to consolidate and expand volunteering worldwide.
The emancipation from colonial rule of many countries in Africa and Asia led to the
birth of a myriad of local voluntary service organizations. From Togo to Kenya, from
Nigeria to India, countries set up volunteeer work camps chiefly devoted to such
tasks as building schools, dispensaries, roads, etc. The emerging nations of the
Third World also began to host qualified long-term volunteers from industrialized
countries. These schemes were mostly bilateral at the outset, but their success led
to the creation three decades ago of the UN Volunteer Programme. UNV is now a multilateral
effort with a high proportion of South-South volunteering. Soon after it gained independence
from Portugal in the late 1970s, for example, Guinea-Bissau hosted a number of Latin
American UNV teachers.
Rusting
the Iron Curtain
Some observers are quick to note that volunteering can be kidnapped or abused to
serve political agendas—the Hitlerjugend Arbeitsdienst labour brigades in Germany
and similar schemes in other totalitarian countries provide some unfortunate illustrations.
There have been many other instances, however, when the opposite has been the case.
The East-West work camps set up during the Cold War are perhaps the most telling
example. These camps (organized by NGOs in the West and party-approved “social organizations”
in the East) aimed to promote contact, concrete cooperation and mutual understanding
between youth from both sides, with Third World volunteers often present as neutral
leavening. Even though small in scale, these initial efforts to rust the Iron Curtain
did not, to put it mildly, please all authorities of the conflicting superpowers
and their allies, hence their lasting symbolic importance.
Help
online
With
the advance of globalization, volunteering is entering another age. While work camps
set up for specific conservation or physical infrastructure projects still mobilize
people, social volunteering (e.g. philanthropic assistance to the homeless) and its
cousins, humanitarian volunteering (for example to assist refugees) and advocacy
volunteering (for such causes as human rights and fair trade) have come into the
spotlight.
A growing trend is that, within and between societies, volunteering is empowering
the excluded: disabled people, immigrants, and more generally, those on the margins
of society are helping their own. In some instances, it is paving the path to recreating
a sense of citizenship: in the U.S. state of Georgia, for example, some 2,000 prison
inmates willingly served as volunteer firemen during the year 2000, following training.
Online volunteering, sometimes criticized as dehumanizing, offers the potential to
involve people who might otherwise be considered unfit to help others. And many recent
initiatives show that there is almost no age limit to becoming a volunteer: in Israel,
10 to 13 year-old students are training retired people in computer literacy, while
retiree volunteering is also an encouraging trend. The Association of Senior European
Counsellors reports, for instance, a network of 15 member bodies in 11 European Union
countries, totalling over 9,000 volunteer consultants.
Such retiree volunteering is a personal concern. I ended my Unesco career in April
1998. Since, I’ve undertaken a number of volunteer assignments for the UNV and various
NGOs, notably in Azerbaijan, Hungary, Palestine and Romania. With due modesty, I
hope I have contributed to a variety of projects there, from recycling of household
trash in Greater Budapest to job creation for the young unemployed in Brasov. All
have brought me invigorating experiences, unexpected learning, even delight. Although
unpaid, volunteering can offer unique non-material remuneration. That is one reason
why I expect that, when he retires in about another quarter century, Sorin Hurdubae
will continue to “lend a helping hand.” |
