World View Magazine - Spring 2008 - (Page 25)

Working Vacations LINKS OF A CHAIN Waves of Global Volunteers seek high impact in needy communities by Jon Kohl “I was a doubting omas. I couldn’t believe I could have any impact,” said Dean LaFrenz before setting out on his first of four Global Volunteers assignments in China. Dean and his wife, Carol, had served in the Philippines in the Peace Corps from 1965 to 1967. How, he thought, could they accomplish much in China in just two weeks? “We really went into a very small village in China and the community welcomed us, lined the streets, played music, and danced. ey embraced the efforts of Global Volunteers. ere were 99 groups behind us and a lot of love and deep feeling. It recalled his experience in the Philippines. “It really felt like a Peace Corps experience in two weeks.” After that experience, the couple signed up for working vacations in Poland, Italy and Greece. To have such an impact, Global Volunteers often sends a series of teams, 10 people to a team, each for three weeks, one picking up where the last one left off and creating an accumulated record of 24 months of work. In Romania, for example, 14 teams arrive in one year. Wave after wave, the volunteers maintain continuity, each deepening the foundation for those that follow. Volunteers arrive on Saturday, get oriented on Sunday, and start a five-day work week with weekends off. Truly, what could a volunteer contribute to community development in only one or two weeks? Cofounders Michele Gran and Bud Philbrook are confident that LaFrenz and some 2,500 who volunteer through the Minneapolis-based Global Volunteers every year will make a big different. is is no tourist trip, Philbrook says, and this is no voluntourism adventure. Travel and tourism operators who crave a piece of the action of volunteer travel. “It disturbs me when we are thrust into the broad category of voluntourism, fumes Philbrook’s wife and the organization’s co-founder. “Nothing about what we do is tourism,” Michele fumes. Philbrook and Gran say they craved serious development work since they decided to spend their honeymoon working in a Guatemala village 20 years ago. When they returned home, friends thought that it was such a great idea they wanted to do the same. So they created their own volunteer corps to wage peace in the world. e logic of that, Gran says, is that “people don’t go to war with those they understand and respect.” Some compare their organization to Peace Corps. Gonomad.com calls Global Volunteers the “mom and pop Peace Corps.” Others labeled it the “mini-Peace Corps.” Global Volunteer’s own website sports a quote from Arthur Frommer’s Budget Travel online: “Join a ‘private’ Peace Corps sponsoring shortterm working vacations, one that has gained my own excited attention to the same extent as the original Peace Corps.” But Gran, who vows great respect for the federal agency, discourages the comparison. “It sounds arrogant,” she says, and blames it on media’s fondness for collapsing, condensing, and thereby trivializing things with catchy phrases …” Bud believes that when volunteers sweat shoulder-to-shoulder with locals, friendships start. Americans, Greeks and Tanzanians discover that their likenesses far outweigh differences. “Friendship is foundational to peace and justice in the world,” Philbrook says. “We’re trying to build an environment where friendship can occur.” e volunteers make friends, he says, but the greater impact comes from the long-term working relations Global Volunteers has created. e faces of the volunteers may flash and fade like shooting stars, but the Global Volunteers partnerships last for years. ey’ve been in one Tanzanian community for 20 years, another in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica for 25. e longevity of the project is due to a combination of factors: the permanent country manager, the service-learning attitude that places the community in charge of the relationship, the extended family tradition that allows many local cultures to assume one group of volunteers knows the next, that local communities greet with open arms upon volunteers’ arrival. “We like to say you’re one link in a long chain,” Gran says. “As a Peace Corps volunteer, you’re not the entire chain but you can make a personal mark in a community.” She says a Global Volunteer can be satisfied to be a link, knowing that others have preceded you and others will follow.” eir concept of a chain of shortterm service began when Philbrook served as a volunteer consultant in a rural village in India with the Institute for Cultural Affairs, an international development organization that uses multi-year, on-site volunteers and applies community development principles rarely practiced in the hitand-run project development world. He admired their methods. “ e key one is local people being in charge of all development. Human and economic development really occurs at the local level and moves up, it doesn’t start up and trickle down. Outsiders in a community, while catalytic and therefore important to the process, have a very fragile role and need to be very careful about how they engage or hope to be engaged with local people.” us in Global Volunteer’s view, WorldView 25 http://Gonomad.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of World View Magazine - Spring 2008

World View Magazine - Spring 2008
Contents
From the President
Lafayette Park
Your Turn
Gallery
Note to Readers
Introduction to the Issue
Engaging Masons
Commentary
Letter from Guatemala
Links of a Chain
Gallery
Science for Good
Letter from Jima
Another Country
Letter from Accra
Community News

World View Magazine - Spring 2008

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