Translated by: María Fidalgo (Master degree at English Filology by Universidad de Oviedo, Master degree at Translation by Universidad de Salamanca) - mariafifer[at]hotmail.com
This is a voluntary-based translation. Proposals, proofreading and comments about the understandability of the contents highly appreciated here
© Pablo Castiñeiras
One of my mates told me about one activity they had to do in the training course for European volunteers in her country. <<They make us throw from a rope to show that we are able to do more things than we expect>>.
They force us to take the initiative but they don’t usually teach us or give us any clue about how to take it. I don’t think initiative is something inherent of humans, as it would be curiosity. Throwing yourself from a rope! I didn’t imagine that girl doing it... Appearances can be deceptive so I have also learnt that you never know your capabilities until you try.
I am more and more convinced, each day, about the fact that having initiative is something that implies, firstly, forwardness and, secondly, effort. It is not something common to the majority of us -sedentary people from the first world-, despite of the fact that we live in a society in which initiative is demanded, not only to win, but also to pay your maintenance and your whims at the end of the month.
It may depend on your personality, you can be daring or faint-hearted and you can’t change it, you cannot modify it with the life experiences or duties that lead you to the middle point between risk and caution.
We use this expression where I come from <<Tombs are full of brave people>>. Streets are even fuller of zombies that do not know how to face real life and always try to be on the defensive.
Some days after my arrival to my EVS project, a meeting was organised to decide about my tasks in the office, where I should be useful for the organization and the local community in the next months.
It is emphasized, although it is not put into practice, the selection and awareness that all parts involved in a project like this one have with regard to their rights and, above all, to their responsibilities and their capacity to take the initiative. The nature of this kind of activities allows a great personal enrichment to the volunteers; to the extent that many of them take advantage and they finally end up being selfish. They don’t exercise their energy and creativity with which they can contribute as young people. Their development as individuals and citizens makes no difference to them; the learning to communicate with the others (learning that is not taught at school), and much more things from which they can get some experience.
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I’m a full member –maybe not practising a lot- of the pragmatic and utilitarian Europe, asking for education, information, work, reinvention… I thought I was more conscious than many other people in relation to the experiences I was going to live in this adventure: my limitations, mi added value and my willingness to collaborate in all the expected tasks, as well as in other tasks that I could carry out by chance. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t surprised when I was asked, just when I arrived, which was the personal project I was going to develop during my voluntary work.
As I didn’t really understand what I was asked for, my reaction was that of asking for time in order to know the needs I had to meet., above all, the scene and the people I was going to work with. To sum up, I wanted time to see in which ways I could be useful, and learn the language of those with whom I had to collaborate, an exotic and devilish language that seemed to be a big obstacle in the real and local integration according to the needs of my project; although I tried to make it familiar and I adopted it with love, without being able to use it at all...
I thought in the same way as a professional manager for international projects would do: I didn’t dare to do anything that I had not previously studied and planned conscientiously; just unlike an enterprising man, for whom the motivation towards the task is the most important factor and then, for all the rest, you only need time, training and perseverance.
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I cannot deny that my main expectation in this adventure was personal development; even some view of the world, as it is for many other people who have lived this experience and have achieved the educational and positive component of it. The Programme´s idea was this one to a great extent. Many others use it for acquiring a better cultural experience or even a better professional perspective, depending on the project in which you are working or the country where you are.
I cannot deny that the fact of living an experience like this one, even if it has taken place in a very different way from what I expected, turn soon my main concern into gazing at the new world that was inside of me. Gazing at my mates and the contemporary people who asked themselves what the hell I was doing in their town, instead of enjoying the sun, the football and the money of a heavenly country like mine. I didn’t need to ask myself the same things, as my answer was given when I decided to quit the already known.
My main concern, for which I didn’t find a clear answer, was what the hell I was able to give them. I didn’t know if I contributed something with my presence or nothing with my efforts, even if I made an effort to give them something instead of only receiving. I was not indispensable, sometimes I felt they didn’t mind if I was there or not. This utilitarian and self-critical attack seemed strange to me, when most of my friends surely thought that it was useless for me not to stay and work in the paradise of my native land but to go to an unknown country with no reasons at all, as if I didn’t know what to do with my own life.
Remembering, I feel I have learnt a lot thanks to this experience, including the anger for not having more support, or the fact that I wanted more time and intelligence to have been able to develop my own initiatives. The feeling of being useful is the most gratifying for those who get involved in any voluntary project. However, the feeling of being useless is the worst you can feel. You realise they don’t need you and all your efforts, your time and your dream expectations have failed, unless you take the initiative and do something to become indispensable.
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Human resources are exploited because of the different view people have of work and voluntary tasks, not only in each particular project but also in the societies of each country.
The feeling of those who went to countries belonging to the former Soviet Union of not being needed (beyond giving a pro-European and pro-opening air to the beneficiaries of the project) is very widespread. This doesn’t mean there are no needs, but most of the times they are hidden. People don’t want to show the scarcity produced unceremoniously by the collapse and the transitional period from a social system of subsidy to another of “every man for himself”. European volunteers are employed in those places where they can be merely decorative objects or, in the worst of the cases, objects of some economic or corporate benefit.
They are not sought for hard projects, like the one which Alberto told us about. Alberto was a volunteer who had a lot of initiative, so he tried to get involved in a Soviet orphanage which was deserted because of the lack of state care provided by the former regime and which the current one denies and leaves in the hands of the private sector.
He didn’t have to cross the Soviet Union’s frontiers; it hapened in one of the Baltic Republics recently joined to the club and to the NATO. Postsoviet memberships sought to defend themselves from the possible future attempts from Russia to annex its territory, as it happened after the Second World War. That invasion makes them hold and wish wild capitalism with which they could forget the cultural impositions of the former regime, as well as the amounts of colonials with a Russian origin and language that still live around there nowadays.
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The concept of voluntary work is problematic, nowadays, and especially within Soviet or communist societies. A spirit of voluntary devotion, related to religious ideas rather than social ones, is not necessary, in theory, in a society where there is no private property or it is in the hands of the State. Nobody is a volunteer of anything, institutions order and cover the social inequalities, instead of the good individual will. In this sense, one activist who is an environmental volunteer, and is against the proliferation of nuclear power stations, would be recriminated as counterrevolutionary in a humanist regime in which the environmental good is sacrificed to the good of the citizens: for having heating and hot water enough for the winter.
On the other side, thanks to the free market, any volunteer may take the risk of being used in substitution of professional workers in the rich countries. It is a cheap labour force that will not lead to the end of inequalities, to the development of a local community or a specific scene but to the increase of productivity and to the privatization of Europe’s social needs.
Some young people do not understand the fact that you can be awarded a grant to do a voluntary work in a European country, since the real needs are in developing countries. It is very difficult to explain to them that there are other reasons for the existence of a programme like this one and for the fact that it is called voluntary service instead of European cooperation.
The concept of voluntary work comes from the West and it is almost compulsory for the young people there, as it was the military service in many countries, despite the contradiction between the concepts. It is considered to be a way by which we learn to achieve social skills at the same time than we help and we appreciate solidarity. This concept, in its future aspect, is broadening and adapting to the new times in which the needs let anyone be a volunteer, being more conscious that you can learn no matter your age.
Volunteering belongs to the capitalist states, since they, unlike the utopic states, are not in charge any more of solving the problems and social inequalities, beyond isolated campaigns or electoral opportunisms. At the most, the voluntary organisations of the civil sector are considered as the patch to cover the needs or the demands that the government do not want to deal with; and, of course, they ask these non-governmental organizations to be more professional, turning it into a third economic sector immersed in marketing campaigns and in competitions in order to get private and public management funding as the subsidiary component of a social support that a Welfare State should not substitute.
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The European Voluntary Service programme involves and provides a better contact and a real knowledge of the host society. Besides, it tries to promote the contact and union among other volunteers, who represent an inferior number compared to other participants in other mobility programmes, and who are hosted at any part of Europe, from the centre of a capital to the depths of a small village. Being conscious of the project and the place where you are going to live during the next months is something crucial in order to avoid premature abandonment and frustration at the first sign of trouble, after so much effort and patience.
Some of the volunteers with whom I was living were always complaining about the fact that they couldn’t do anything useful in their projects. Instead of managing to undertake the work and being useful without anyone giving orders to them (as it is expected from youngsters educated under neoliberalism) they preferred to blame the former comunists. For them, the social regime that moulded the education of the workers they collaborated with was the reason, for the idleness and the lack of initiative of the workers beyond what they have been taught for.
These fantasies didn’t let the free volunteers to think about the way of being useful in their projects by themselves. They didn’t realise they were those who had to be essential and, with their complaints, they only accounted for not moving their alternative asses, not because of disobedience of the system but because of the hypocrisy of moral ideologies like capitalism, preaching some behaviour as good, at the same time it doesn’t teach the necessary skills and attitudes to develop it. It is the daily bread which makes it easier for a minority, -the one of being able to develop these skills-, of taking the biggest part of the social cake while the rest of the people are invited to the feast as mere spectators.
<<There is nothing new under the Sun>> Being born, surviving, going sightseeing, trying to reproduce yourself and dying; or, at least, that is what some of us are set not to believe, to make things appear new and, if necessary, to change the north in the compass.
According to some ideologies, we need to believe in order to survive, no matter we believe in something reasonable or illusionary. Some people think we should not believe beyond the things we have been educated about, that is, the easy way, which has been defended by intolerant and fanatic people by promoting the fear to the unknown. Other people, as a reaction to this, become absorbed in everything that is alternative to the established things, as a way of feeling different and of finding themselves in the difference.
In the schizophrenic society of the “one-track thinking” and the isolation of people in sects, diference is, at the same time, represed and promoted. It is promoted as something meritorious, as long as your difference follows the fashion rules and the fashion brands of the moment.
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Thanks to this ability of our brains to activate sleepy areas and buck us up in challenges such as being with foreign people, far from our family and the suits we use with them, we feel able to do everything; we are hungry in all senses. That new strength let you dare to do things which you would never do or even dream about in your homeland. It is essential, in many occasions (like the necessity of autonomy and independence of free people), to go out in order to live new experiences and find what you have always dreamed of.
Whenever you dare to do something new, the moments and experiences of learning will appear unexpectedly in your trip. Being daring to throw you in a rope is something which you didn’t expect, in an EVS pre-departure training course you attended to get some advices and tips about your future experience. It creates some impact on you, although at the beginning it may seem to be a crazy idea if you consider it after some time.
There are several reasons that do not let us do new things. New things have been usually seen as something dangerous for the established social order, even for life.
New things appear in an obligatory way for the urban young people: from their parents, their teachers, the religious ceremonies… If they are considered to be a formal imposition, they can be lived with anguish and fear. Our ancestors, young people from the rural world who were more in touch with the natural environment, also had to face new situations and social obligations. The difference is that they had access to the amazement of discovering infinity of new things which are hidden nowadays: the mysteries of life and death, little discovers as the first time you milked a cow, the discovering of the precedence of calves, or how to contemplate a pigs’ slaughter, so traditional in my country in order to get meat to face the winter.
Nowadays, children do not know all these mysteries and it is not an impact for them to go to the supermarket for the first time and buy any product, as if they had arrived there by magic. Now they only know the origin of some products thanks to the farm schools and some similar non-formal initiatives. Our rootlessness from the minimum strategies of survival out of the town is becoming bigger and bigger. I was told an anecdote about the Scouts (famous for teaching children strategies of orientation and survival) during a celebration of the anniversary of their foundation. A lot of groups of young people got lost in the orientation activities, so now they organise more activities to develop that skill.
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The huge curiosity of the human being makes our fear to the unknown disappear, looking for new experiences. Being young means navigating between two opposite sides. We must try to experience and know what is unknown by the old people or what they do not tell us in order to go further than our ancestors. The repression imposed by the old people is just an encouragement to make fearful young people try those things that, if not banished, they wouldn’t even think about breaking because of fear or weakness.
However, nowadays repression is called consumption and is sold as liberation. There is nothing forbidden, you only have to know how to look for in the proper market in order to get some experience. Hardly we realise when we do something new and interesting for the first time. We just consume experiences insured by all kinds of prophylaxis measures, to an extent that it is difficult to differentiate when security measures are really that or repression threads.
When it appears something new which promises an alternative to the things we consider out of date and we reject, the usual reaction is to welcome the new things. During this invention of modern societies called adolescence, we are always living first experiences. However, in this world is very difficult to believe in a real way; it is a world of chatterboxes in which the aim justifies the means and the advertisements have gone beyond formal education, as they want to fool us. New generations have become faithless people with a mentality of destruction, even of self-destruction. As it says the song “Bombs” by “Faithless”, which makes reference to the way of living of the sectarian and destructive North American empire: <<My life is done so now I got to kill someone>>.
If a group of teenagers gather in a gang, not only to train themselves for the sectarian society of the future but also daring to be more original by creating symbols, music, manifestos and their own ideas (Social anthropologists call them urban tribes), the cool hunters (respectful and post-modern professionals who could be considered, in other times, members of a secret police of a Big Brother`s state) will be in charge of transforming their identity signs and, especially, their way of dressing, to become a well-paid registered trademark. They will be part of the bog shopping centres and the fashionable shops. Trading for the waste and enjoyment of the rich kids who can afford it.
If Afro-Americans invent a new music style, and their youngsters show their underwear to create a tribe consciousness -the rap and the low and baggy trousers, used as a tribute to those imprisoned brothers, fettered with low and baggy prisoner’s clothes too-, then alarms will ring. In that moment, the fashion magazines and the music enterprise will have to choose a white boy, really white who seems to be a rebel and who copy the music style and show his underwear as well.
All the dangerous things for the establishment are abolished, turned into a cool trend in the catwalk and wished by most of the people, so the old brothers start to sell themselves to the highest bidder and the payed teen fame. All subversive and alternative elements will be eliminated through a non written social deal.
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It is very difficult to admit a first time experience among false idols; we will admit the learning experience of a real first time later, when there is something in our brain that makes us give sense to things which seemed senseless or even bad to us.
It took me ages to realise about the importance of some first experiences which I didn’t recognise as such at first, which came up to my mind in a sudden way (just living other adventures or remembering some from the past). Some, to my regret, became very important; they are revelations about oneself that do not seem so clear when you want something anxiously and, once you get it, you get bored and deceived because you only wanted the adrenalin of your success, like the one you feel when throwing yourself into the void.
We did more things for the first time in six months than we would have imagined.
Next time you do something new, ask yourself if the experience is really worthy to become part of the club of the first things.