V.S.A. can be a school of hard knocks

Press, 21 February 1987, Page 21

V.S.A. can be a school of hard knocks

“Loneliness,” wrote a Volunteer Service Abroad worker, “is a single dirty coffee cup at four in the afternoon and a worn-put tape of ‘Abbey Road* (Beatles music). It is watching your first* visitor ride away in a dustcovered bus and remembering a joke and having no-one to laugh with ... yes, I get lonely." Volunteering can be a school of hard knocks. An engineer in Tonga, asked to report on his health, replied: “Excellent, thank you. The scars I received when the wall fell on me have almost healed.”

For accommodation, some volunteers have put up with the most basic arrangements for months on end, if not years. Towards the end of his teaching year in Vanuatu in 1966, a school-leaver volunteer, Tony Browne, wrote: “By now I am most proficient at sleeping on a mat on a hard floor, with perhaps a pair of pants as a pillow. What an unnecessary thing a bed is!”

As for transport, another teacher assigned to Vanuatu summed up his lot — and that of countless other volunteers — “jandals and a dusty road.” Physical hardship has rarely detracted from the experience. Often it has enlivened it, bearing out the theory that adversity can be most instructive. So, who are the volunteers and what is volunteering? To j attempt any general responses about the nature of volunteers is unwise, if not downright foolish, for volunteers are as diverse as the work they tackle. Many people within the V.S.A. movement have tried to set down in Words the depth of feeling and experience in volunteering, and they admit that finding an adequate form of words is not easy. It may be simpler to state what volunteering is not It is not an avenue for cheap aid to countries less well off. Nor is it just a platform for building friendship between this country and the developing world, although that does form part of it The essence of it is more concerned with the individual, how he or she benefits while at the same time creating some good. For the past 23 years V.S.A. has Been sending abroad people whose inner strength was reckoned on as being as dependable .as their practical abilities. It takes courage to confront deepfelt anxieties and see an assignment through — and more courage still, perhaps, to decide you cannot cope and must quit and come home before the allotted time, there to face friends, family, coilleagues. Yet for every volunteer who returns early there is usually one who chooses to extend assignment or stay on; in the

country under a separate employment contract This is “stickability." Eighty-eight volunteers have either extended their assignments or taken up new ones with V.S.A. at a later date.

For some people V.S.A. volunteering is addictive once in the blood. Robert Jordan, a horticulturalist from Northland, holds the record for length of service. He worked in Niue for three years five months (1978-81), then in Vanuatu for four years one month (1981-85) — a total.of 7!£ years. An adviser in the produc-

tion of cash crops such as copra and passionfruit while in Niue, he became an agricultural loans officer in Vanuatu with a base on the island of Malekula. But he very nearly did not make it The plane carrying him from Vila to Malekula at the start of the assignment crashed. Another passenger was killed and the pilot seriously injured. Bob was a hospital case but recovered within a few months. He stayed on for four years, travelling widely in his work — by air, sea and land, often walking for'hours

to get to a project. Fof years the longest-serving V.S.A. volunteer was Miller (Bill) Dunning, of Auckland, an agriculturalist who led a water resources development team on the Nampong River scheme in Thailand in 1966-68 and who subsequently worked, again through V.S.A., as a designer of irrigation and other water projects. No other V.S.A. volunteer has worked longer in one country — seven years four months. Bill Dunning applied for the job after working for 15 years on

sheep and cattle stations in outback Australia, locations where water conservation was critical. After the V.S.A. assignments he continued working in Thailand and in 1977 went to Vietnam to help set up a model cattle farm under Australian aid. For the last three years he has worked as a training and extension adviser on sheep research and development projects at five ’ sites in China.

And what started him out on this path was an advertisement he saw in an Auckland newspaper in early 1966 — a V.S.A. job in Thailand. He is among a select group of volunteers who have chosen to spend the rest of their working lives in the developing world.

It is somewhat more common for former V.S.A. volunteers with a continuing interest in the developing world to be recruited for aid projects overseas from New Zealand. Other volunteers have chosen a diplomatic career after returning home.

A volunteer’s links with the country assigned to are no more closely forged than through marriage. Given that the majority of volunteers are single and of marriageable age, it is not surprising that many of them marry local people. A smaller number marry other volunteers, occasionally other V.S.A. volunteers.

Not until recent years has V.S.A., reflecting more liberal public attitudes towards solo parenting, been an avenue for single adult volunteers with dependent J children. Chris McLean, a ; teacher, took five-year-old Tamara to Tonga on a two-year assignment in 1983-84. Lesley . Patterson and Alice, her four- '

year-old daughter, have just begun a teaching assignment in Vanuatu.

Altogether about 140 couples (almost a third of all adult volunteers) have undertaken V.S.A. work in the Pacific, Asia, or Africa Western Samoa (27), Tonga (22), and Fiji (21) have been the main destinations.

The youngest volunteers, of course, were the school leavers, many of whom were 17 (the minimum age was Out on his own at the opposite end of the age range is Tom Wardill, a doctor from Tauranga, who had his 75th birthday during a short assignment in Western Samoa in 1976.

The volunteer roil contains a slightly larger proportion of women (52 per cent) than men, although in some years the males predominated. In 1985, for example, 56 per cent of the volunteers were male. Further analyses for that year showed that 52 per cent were over the age of 30, 13 per cent over 40, and 76 per cent were single. For the astrologically minded, 57 per cent were born under just three star signs — Libra, Aquarius, and Aries.

Many candidates apply for V.S.A. because they know a volunteer personally. This may. be ; an advantage to them because if they have t spent time with a , returned - volunteer tirey - will know something of the heights and depths of the experience and ofhow they, might cope themselves. j For other applicants an advertisement is often the trigger. Some jobs lend themselves to intriguing vacancy notices. “Wanted: Presbyterian rodeo rider with a flair for forestry and a taste for taro” ran one advertisement, which sought to attract a forester who could work on a roadless outer island in Vanuatu and live in a subsistence village setting.

Isolation and a limited food supply are common to many

assignments, in which case V.S.A. will be looking out for resourcefulness aplenty in the applicant, if not pronounced survival instincts. '*• For the volunteer rocked back on his or her own resources, there are dilemmas that can concentrate the mind in curious ways. Alan Freshwater’s “Fourteen Uses for a Swiss Army Knife in Melanesia" is a subject lesson in ingenuity. A water supply technician in the Solomon Islands, he clearly faced dilemmas daily. With his knife he could, among other things, remove sea urchin spines from his feet, convert a Foster’s beer can into a canoe bailer, file a copy of a key to the outboardmotor shed, remove sleeves from T-shirts, trim his moustache, and cut the heads off very poisonous snakes held down by a stick so short the knees trembled and the mouth panted for a cigarette. Twenty-five years after V.S.A/S launching, it is tempting to cast one’s eye across the kaleidoscope of assignments and pick out a job that evokes volunteering at its most dynamic. The eye would boggle, though —

doctoring Th Nepal, teaching in Bhutan, geologising in Indonesia, planting trees in Vanuatu, building wharves in Tonga, raising cattle in Fiji... The list goes on and on,-each job an incomparable adventure in itself, with some jobs, plain on paper, transformed by sheer effort and enterprise bn the part of the volunteer. Volunteers launch themselves into the unknown and the unpredictable, putting their cultural Identity, competence, and moral beliefs — indeed their very purpose in life — on the line. It is no small thing, this volunteering. There are risks, however calculated. Yet the rewards' always in the end seem to compensate. ; ; As they relate to life around them, volunteers , develop, a deeper understanding of how they themselves tick, and from that insight they can better relate and cope. By the end of the assignment they realise they have learnt as much as they have given, and that perhaps more than any other experience volunteering has pushed them towards their potential.

More women

than men