A pessimist, they say, sees a glass of water as being half empty;
an optimist sees the same glass as half full.
But a giving person sees a glass of water
and starts looking for someone who might be thirsty.
–G. Donald Gale
One of my goals prior to arriving in NZ was to find some volunteer work here. In order to justify this I told myself that volunteering would allow me to branch out and see what other fields interest me. In hindsight I can see that this is the American, resume polishing, utilitarian side of me saying, “Well, you’d better get something out of it if you aren’t going to make any money!”
I haven’t done any real volunteer work since the end of high school. Even then volunteering was something that we were told to do by our teachers because this was looked upon favorably by college admissions and would help us win scholarships. So I did some tutoring to underprivileged kids and worked on a hotline for troubled teens. This was fairly easy stuff, filling in the “needs extra attention” part of societal lack. Some kids were having a hard time bonding with other kids or they needed help with their homework or they were otherwise troubled and didn’t have anyone that they could confide in. But I reached a point towards the end of my junior year of high school where I felt that enough was enough. I didn’t want to hear anymore sad stories and I wanted to have fun.
Once I was on the path through college, I learned that people didn’t really care about volunteer work. That was something that we were supposed to do before college to show that we’d built character. When I was in the college admissions office I was met with a puzzled look when I asked if they did any outreach to the community, expecting that this “character building” exercise would continue. To my surprise their form of outreach, if any, was publicizing open lectures. I attended a few of these lectures and saw that it was attended by the college community and others from the surrounding leisure class. Why had I tried so hard to impress others with volunteer work if this was what people of character did once they had established said character?
Eventually, I stopped asking the question about volunteering. I gave in to the studies set before me and to the social discourse that buzzed on and on. When September 11th happened, I was surrounded by students that asked, “What can we do? We shouldn’t just be here doing nothing while people are dying. We can help.” Their eyes were wet with sorrow and upset. A response came out of me that I hadn’t anticipated, “I know how you feel, but trust me, we are doing it. This is our role in a needful world- to learn as much as we can, to complete our studies. What we do contributes to the peace of the world.”
And now, with the college years behind me, I’ve moved to New Zealand with my partner. The commitment of 9 to 5 work is gone temporarily and I find myself asking, “Where am I needed? What is needed here?” All it took was a little bit of searching through the Volunteering Canterbury website, a couple of email inquiries, a phone interview, an interview in person, a couple more weeks, and finally I am back in the seat of volunteering again.
This time I am helping adult students work on their conversational English. So far, I have met students from China and Russia, some elderly with grandchildren and some just beginning their families. They were very inquisitive about me. They wanted to know where I’ve lived, where my parents are, if I like the food here, and what my hobbies are. Of themselves, they are still a bit shy. They offer me warnings about not carrying too much cash, advice on what cities are beautiful to visit, what vegetables can be grown in this climate, and where I can take waltz classes.
There were smiles across the table when I told the students that I get confused between the “a” and the “e” sounds and then between the “i” and the “u” sounds and that altogether I am terrible with foreign languages. I told them about my frequent upset at unexpected differences in expressions, such as hearing someone say in a Kiwi accent “take away” instead of “to go.” I was surprised to hear one student echo me in a Chinese accent, “To go. Take away. To go. Take away.” We all found this to be very funny, I suspect for different reasons.
At most this sort of volunteer work takes two hours out of one day a week and the students are very appreciative of the time spent. I can see on their faces that they start to get tired after an hour. It takes a lot out of you to bridge a communication gap for that long. I know how that feels, especially on days when I just want to turn on an American movie and close the blinds and pretend that I am in America doing American things.
In working with these students, I am finding some compassion for myself. I chose to hold off on looking for a paying job. I told myself there was something to gain by choosing another path. To be a stranger here and to come to terms with the complexities of a new culture, to learn its use of language, to find one’s place whilst being foreign– these things are work, the sort of work where one feels vulnerable and oftentimes foolish. Yet it is work that can be embraced joyfully and communally. Perhaps in a few months I will tell you how I distilled this into my CV, but for now I am just enjoying the experience.
