About a year and a half ago, I visited a friend in New York who works for a hedge fund. “And what do you do?” her friends asked me, as we lazed in Central Park. The answer – volunteer programs management at an NGO – elicited a quite surprising amount of admiration, albeit tinged with schaden[...]
Posts Tagged ‘Uruguay’
December 16th, 2010 - 9:00 am § in In the Field, Looking for Opportunity, Nonprofit Spotlight, Tips & Resources, Uruguay
Volunteerism in Latin America: The Uruguay Picture
When my fellow grant recipients and I arrived in Uruguay, one of the first questions our program officer asked us was: “And what kind of volunteer work would you like to do?” Volunteering is part of our role. But she was quick to warn us that volunteering isn’t as common here as in the U.S[...]
Wanted: Brut Strength
The first time I saw G., the nurses had called him over to break a door down. The key had snapped off in the lock of the woodshed, and we needed the wood to make seed bed frames. The second time I saw G. at the psychiatric hospital, we needed someone with brute strength to bang [...][...]
Now Comes the Hard Part
Sometimes, it’s the hardest question to answer. Before a choir concert the other night, my conductor’s 7-year-old daughter came over to greet me with the customary peck on the cheek and added: “They told me you’re leaving? You’re leaving and you’re not coming b[...]
Have a Happy (anti) Halloween
I didn’t like Halloween when I was a kid. I was too self-conscious for the school parade part, and too shy for the knocking on strangers’ doors part. It was a relief to move to Chile in 2003 and more or less ignore the day. Many people didn’t like the concept of Halloween because[...]
Street Art from the Southern Cone
Urban space as a live canvas. I can be a difficult person to travel with down here in the Southern Cone: walk two feet, stop, fish out camera, narrowly avoid traffic, squirrel away camera again. I once wandered Buenos Aires with a classmate who was working with graffiti artists. They told her (I va[...]
Blog Action Day, 2010: Water – How to Reach Eight Glasses a Day
This post is in honor of Blog Action Day today. Latin America contains 26% of the world’s water resources and hosts 6% of the world’s population. This means a lot; this means little. Unequal water distribution is not just spatial. It is temporal, through cycles of drought and flood. It [...]
The Grass is Greener Syndrome, Once Again
“Uruguayans are pessimists,” Cao said, as a group of us lounged by the hospital garden, all dirty hands and sunburnt faces. “They don’t take opportunity…this is a developing country. In the U.S. and Germany, people are more positive.” The German girl next to me nearly choked in d[...]
