Volunteering is a great way to pay it forward on your travels. Here are some of the benefits volunteering can achieve!
Over the last ten years, I’ve encountered many random acts of kindness from total strangers around the world. There was the Indian hostel owner who rode his motorbike alongside our public bus until it stopped, then handed me the iPod I’d forgotten back at his hostel in Jaipur. There was the elderly woman who beckoned to me from behind her metal fence on the Camino de Santiago route in Spain and handed me a fistful of fresh figs from her garden, so I could snack while I walked.
Generosity like this is a wonderful thing to experience – and it works both ways. The beauty of travel is that it inspires all of us to be kinder, and provides us with many opportunities to pay it forward for other people too.
The decision to start volunteering on my travels was borne mainly out of curiosity. While offering my time and skills to help in whatever ways I was able, I also wanted to see who I would meet, what stories I could learn, and how I could better understand the countries I was visiting. But over the years there’s been a shift: the more projects I volunteer with, the more I realise that the threads which link us all together are kindness, generosity and a desire to help each other.
I’ve volunteered with over a dozen different projects in Asia, Europe and South America, and every experience has been invaluable in shaping how I see and interact with the world. On International Random Acts of Kindness Day, I’d like to tell the EE Community about some of the most important lessons I’ve learned from volunteering abroad.
Volunteering teaches you respect, humility and adaptability
Spending significant time within another culture different to your own can be full of surprises. You might encounter different foods, clothing requirements, religious beliefs, political views – and they can all be difficult for you to adapt to. In Bolivia, I stayed with a Quechua family while volunteering at a rural library. The whole village had no running water or sewage system and I could barely understand their local dialect: although the people living there could evidently handle their way of life, I quickly succumbed to culture shock. Yet when I thought about how this family had opened up their home to me, I felt very humble and tried not to take their generosity for granted.
Volunteering builds confidence and leadership
Volunteering as a teacher in Ecuador meant I had to think on my feet. Adapting lesson plans with thirty pairs of teenage eyes scrutinising you requires stamina! After a few months of teaching I’d become more authoritative: I knew how to take control of an unruly classroom and I’d watched my students’ level of English improve, which made me reevaluate what I was capable of. Moreover, I felt like a valuable part of the school’s teaching community.
Volunteering cultivates community spirit
I spent two weeks in the Calais refugee camps during the winter of 2015 and was blown away by the international community of volunteers which had sprung up seemingly from nowhere. This huge relief effort originated mainly on social media, with hundreds of Facebook threads segueing into an increasing numbers of cars driving to France filled to the brim with donations and thousands of people from all over Europe coming together to pay it forward. These volunteers knew their relative privilege allowed them to take time away from their jobs and families to organise donations in a chilly warehouse and distribute them to refugees each day. I was humbled to be a cog in the machine here, and felt constantly amazed how many individual people deciding to help could make such an impact.
EE is all about paying it forward – this week they are celebrating International Random Acts of Kindness Day too. They'd love to hear about your own random acts of kindness in the comments below.
Because of the breadth of experiences I’ve had with different communities around the world, giving back to my own community has become second nature: I volunteer at soup kitchens and local shelters, help people with their bags and buggies, and stop and chat to the homeless. The lessons I’ve learned from volunteering abroad have naturally filtered through to my daily life at home, and I know these projects have changed me for the better.
Being part of any community is innately valuable – like the EE Community, which provides EE 24/7 support for its members. It’s a peer to peer forum where members can help each other out – whether supporting them through technical issues, recommending products and services that will suit them, or even just chatting about their favourite features of their phones and the apps they use.
EE is all about paying it forward – this week they are celebrating International Random Acts of Kindness Day too. They'd love to hear about your own random acts of kindness in the comments below.
Or if another EE Community member has gone the extra mile and helped you out let us know. Just tell us in the comments below who you think deserves a little something extra, and the staff team will be handing out some rewards!
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