Dear Future Volunteer

(free-form letter to future volunteers working with AJWS)
August 11, 2008

Dear Future Volunteer,

My name is Lily, and I spent the last year as a World Partner Fellow working with NGO X in Hyderabad, India. As a documentation officer on the ABCD Project, I wrote reports, worked on grants, participated in project planning meetings, launched a resource website, and helped my co-workers to develop abstracts for an international conference.

Its common to hear that India is a place of great extremes... what I didn't realize before leaving was that not only is India home to the extremely poor and excessively rich, mountain deserts and sea-level swamps, multi-million people metropolises and endless acres of tiny farming communities -- its also everything in between. The only things that are difficult to find there are stick deodorant and public trash cans. The ride from the airport to your first destination will probably be the most frightening experience you have -- once you're used to the mad dash that constitutes Indian traffic, malaria and monsoons won't look so intimidating.

As you begin to adjust to the kaleidescope experience that confronts you each day as you leave your home (and often through the walls when you're trying to sleep at night), you'll be able to settle in to your life at work. The most useful thing I did for my own volunteer experience at work was to loosen my concepts of productivity and success -- I counted every friendship, every clear communication with co-workers, every nonverbal interaction with the young children we served and the tea lady who served us, as a success, as something to take pride and comfort in. This allowed me to feel productive right away, even when I was still adjusting to my office and apartment, and accomplishing astonishingly little in the way I was used to counting 'work' after eighteen years of rigorous education and summer research jobs.

Once I had 'adjusted' (always a relative word) to my daily life in India, people began to ask me how I felt I had changed, and the first thing that always came to mind was my capacity for and store of patience: my capacity increased exponentially, but my supply was often scraping bottom. My mother told me she worried that India would make me too 'hard' -- constantly bargaining for each service rendered, coping emotionally with the daily interaction with extreme poverty -- and while I would never pretend that there was anything 'easy' about living in India, I like to think of the experience as a perfect example of 'productive discomfort.' Sometimes its important for us to step outside of the familiar, to take life out of context, in order to gain a clearer of view of ourselves and the world that we live in. Working and living in India is a perfect opportunity to do just that.

Welcome to the rabbit hole. Its a long drop down, but its worth the ride.

Sincerely,

Lily