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Published: September 19th 2009
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A while ago I cooked up a great plan to keep myself busy and active and at the same time do something that feels good and worthwhile. The idea of 'volunteer work' is unfortunately unknown in my country. I was lucky enough to work in a country where 'volunteer work ' is a job in itself ; where people are dedicated and eager to do volunteer work, where the little spare time you get, you go down to a 'Cancer Research' center or any other non-for-profit association and you offer a bit of your time, skills or knowledge to help others. Volunteer work means not only offering your time and skills, but acquiring new ones, learning new things yourself, maximizing your own potential, enhancing your job prospects, etc. It means dedicating time and energy and gaining so much more! In Romania, as long as something doesn't pay and money don't come out of it, volunteer work is completely useless. Pointless. I beg to differ. Volunteer work is more than money. It is gaining
experience. In big cities in developed countries people- students especially, but not only- fight over intern positions and volunteer work in big or small organisations. They go to
interviews, write Cover Letters and try hard to present themselves professionally in order to get a chance to work as a volunteer or intern for a few months. They don't get paid, no they don't, but money is not everything. The experience they accumulate over that period of time is priceless!
One of the themes I discussed over a training session was
'Are people willing to do things without getting anything in return? ' and everybody expected me to say 'Yes, they do!' but I was the first to disagree and said 'No, nobody does anything out of good will, there is always something they're after and they wish to gain'. My students replied, as expected: 'But you're running this training free of charge.' The explanation I gave them was simple: 'I'm gaining a lot of experience! I am not earning money, but am gaining loads of hands-on how-to-deal-with-adults in a learning environment experience. Although I've done it before, I've never done it in my own country, and the experience is different.' When I say 'getting something in return' I don't necessarily mean money, it can be experience, it can be hands-on skills, it can be dealing with different
ages or difficult people, dealing with clients in big companies and corporations, it can mean simply gaining personal satisfaction for helping, a ' I feel good about myself and happy to have contributed to something for a better tomorrow' personal pride, it can be many things we gain out of volunteer or intern work. It can be a reference letter and something to add to your CV and show that you are ambitious, success-driven, or possess social skills or...whatever! It is always a gain, never a loss! It can mean meeting new people, socialising, opening up to new challenges in life, improving communication and interpersonal skills, and why not? making new friends!
The experience I had at the
'Dinicu Golescu' Central Library in Pitesti was fabulous! Everybody was extremely eager and dedicated and I loved it to bits! It all started with an informal chat I had with the Library director who was surprisingly cooperative and who managed to get one forth of her employees involved in the training, which was amazing. I honestly didn't believe something like that could run so smoothly and problem-free in Romania. But it did. Of course, you'll say 'It was free English classes,
of course anybody would have jumped at the opportunity' but my point is that people in their forties and fifties joined the course and did homework and were never late and were always eager and enthusiastic!! It's good to see that things do change in Romania and it is amazing to see that
I have the power to make things change. AMAZING! I do need to thank the Library director wholeheartedly as she was very enthusiastic, prompt and organised all the details of the training.
I love getting involved in voluntary work and I truly believe that here, in Romania, with the horrible crises ahead of us and all the redundancies that will undoubtedly start to materialise starting this autumn, people need to re-think their life-style, their mentality, and to take volunteer and intern work seriously, to be more generous, to try to make a difference, for themselves and for the others as well.
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Madalina Elena Martinescu
non-member comment
SHOCK
Mona I am really happy to read all your ideas and experiences during this volunteer work. But I have to share with you my ”BIG SHOCK... Read more” about how things work in our STATE schools and in Romanian system. It wasnt a great feeling when I was in front of my ”students”, so-called students, aged 17 or 18, some of them even younger, and see that The Respect for their teacher is absent, that the interest for learning is non-existent, that whatever you try to do to awake that curiosity again-that was present before in teenagers minds-you just deal with a huge WALL of IGNORANCE...all of these things make you feel so disarmed, so hopeless that maybe one day the country that you so much love, that made you the adult you are now, will never change, will never flourish, will never offer a better life for your children. I am so disappointed...feeling so useless in this system. I cant see any use of my presence in their lives, I can see no use of my efforts, everything being for nothing.