“Never waste a volunteer’s time.”

As a Volunteer Coordinator in Chicago for a few years, that was always my mantra. I’d be planning three-hour events down to the minute, and my goal was always to be engaging a volunteer in our mission and keeping them working. Overall, volunteers in the States wanted to dive in and save the world in the three hours they had. When I took off for Latin America, I found things somewhat different.

Like I expected, I found organizations run by passionate hard-working people and volunteers wanting to make a difference, but overall, there were just more challenges to overcome. When I signed on as a volunteer and a Volunteer Coordinator in El Salvador and elsewhere in Central America, things just took more time. Maybe it was a bus strike, rainstorm, or who knows what, little tasks could be complicated. We had a harder time getting volunteers, not to mention getting volunteers to make a commitment.

There were days I volunteered that I felt underutilized and frustrated that I couldn’t create programs or make more of an impact like I had back home. I’d dreamed big and wanted to help them make changes, but it wasn’t meant to be.

Try as I did to be realistic and grounded about working in another country, I still struggled to balance my skills with their needs.

My lessons that I took from volunteering:

1) I had to adopt a new mantra. “They’ll use me how they need me, and I just need to be patient.” And I had to accept it.

2) I had to be comfortable being a follower and less a leader. With a short term commitment, I wasn’t the best person to drive changes that I wouldn’t be able to see though.

3) I’m not actually helping as a volunteer if I’m not doing the things they really need from me. A volunteer can actually make more work for an organization.

In hindsight, I can see that I was making a difference. Even if it wasn’t in the ways I thought best, it was in the ways they needed me.