How can volunteering help you in the real world? There are countless reasons that I won’t go into here, but they include adding something to your resume, allowing you to give something back to the world, or giving you some important life skills. Over the long Holy Week weekend (Easter), I realized that my volunteering experience has taught me to ask the right kind of questions.
A friend was driving us back to Barranquilla from Cartagena, where I’d spent some of the weekend, and we decided to spot by a beach to see what it looked like — it was beautiful like so many beaches in Colombia, but this isn’t a blog about beaches. On the way out, we had an “orientation breakdown” and ended up taking a road that wasn’t the way we’d come. As the dirt road became worse and worse, we started to wonder how the car was going to make it out with five people in it, and when we came to a hill that I would have said needed a 4×4 before I came to Colombia, it was time for a friend and me to get out and see where exactly we were going. We ran up the hill and found someone working in the hacienda there — pretty much the only person we saw on the road. I asked him how the road to get onto the main road was and how far it was: I was told it was good and the main road was closed. Then I realized I was asking the wrong kind of question.
I’ve written before that almost every time we interview a microfinance borrower working as a Kiva Fellow in Colombia, we ask them what they think of their barrio and that the answer is normally that the barrio is “safe,” “quiet” or that the levels of muggings are “normal,” which often ends with a raised eyebrow back in the office. It’s not that I don’t trust our borrowers — I have no doubt that their barrio is safe for them but wouldn’t be for me — it’s more that their perspective is completely different and that more than often, you have to ask what other people think of their barrio to get a more individual answer.
Our journey from the beach was just another one of these cases. The proper question to ask was, “In this car, is it best to carry on this way, or go back the way we came?” It was better to turn around and go back.
Rob Packer is currently working as a Kiva Fellow with the Fundación Mario Santo Domingo in Barranquilla, Colombia. For more on his experiences, check out his blog or follow him on Twitter.
Latest posts by robpacker
- You, You and You - April 1st, 2010
- Working in the Barrios - March 17th, 2010
- Day in the Life: Times are Changing - March 9th, 2010
- Amigos - March 2nd, 2010
- Day in the Life: Barranquilla Carnival - ¡Quien lo vive, es quien lo goza! - February 16th, 2010
- Weird Words and How to Learn Them - February 9th, 2010
- Living in Two Worlds at Once - February 2nd, 2010
- ¡Por Fin, Me Quejo! - January 26th, 2010
