THE VOLUNTEER EXPERIENCE
A Life Changing Experience, offering you a New Mission
The quality of life for most people
in the Third World is very different than the quality of life for
most people in the United States. I have helped volunteers begin to
voice some of the thoughts spinning through their minds, as they ride
around dusty towns in taxis that are literally being held together
with huge rubber bands, and have helped the volunteers to begin to
accept the blunt reality that their life in the USA has been, in fact,
an incredible priviledge. With the dawning of a new understanding
about some of the realities that many people outside of the United
States face, I have helped volunteers cope with simple facts like:
a volunteer may own two pairs of shoes while millions of people in
the world have no shoes at all; a volunteer's bedroom may be large
enough to house an entire family; and what a U.S. citizen can earn
in one month is more than millions of families live on for an entire
year.
Emotions experienced by a volunteer
team are very powerful emotions that can be understood or mis-understood,
listened to or ignored, harnessed or turned loose. Pre-trip planning
and preparation, adequate time to share and understand the trip's
experiences, and real follow-up after the trip, are all crucial to
making the most of an International Volunteer Experience. As far as
my wife and I know, almost all volunteers who have traveled with us
have had life changing experiences. Almost all have expressed a very
strong desire to do more work overseas, and a few have gone into international
aid, development, and/or ministry careers. These volunteers have also
carried their emotions back to their home churches, have shared their
international experiences with other churches, and some have published
their stories in a variety of publications.
I believe that if a church in
the United States sends a team of volunteers to a country like Haiti,
that team can have experiences that are capable of re-vitalizing their
home church in the United States. American volunteers often return
from their international assignments with a new mission and real purpose
in life: to find and help the many real people in real need around
the world.
Independent Study statistics
confirm the beliefs that my wife and I have, that international volunteer
teams are able to make significant positive changes in both the churches
they visit overseas, and in their own churches back home.
The answer to the question "should we
volunteer overseas?" is an overwhelming "YES". The only
other question is: "how shall we begin?"
