Month 13.4. Volunteering in the Balkans.

I was in Macedonia this week for a training seminar. The participants were volunteers and employees at different NGO's across Europe. The theme was "social inclusion." The seminar was meant to teach participants how to involve disadvantaged youth in the projects offered by the NGO's. I wish I could give you some answers how, but in fact I didn't get any.

I got plenty of answers about other things, though. For example, what it entails (realistically) to get any kind of volunteer project going in the Balkans. I realize that most of my lovely blog readers will never become volunteers in this region, nor perhaps anywhere else. But volunteers are around to spread things to people who don't have them. Those things can be anything – love, medical attention, food, knowledge. So far, as a volunteer, I haven't saved the whales or performed CPR. But I can share with you a bit of practical wisdom about volunteering itself. It may be a weak start to a successful volunteering term (a meta-start to be precise), but it's a start.

I would like to begin with one main observation about volunteering in the Balkans. I'll be perfectly blunt about it, because everyone beats around the bush and someone needs to tell it like it is. My observation is that the volunteers here are totally lost. I don't mean they're brainless. I mean that they come to the Balkans ready to pump some life into the community, but within a few months nothing is pumping but a few lazy breaths. We have become a troop of hot air balloons, wheezing and floating around aimlessly.

Not all volunteers are that way. I'm talking only about volunteers from EVS, a European program that allows young people to volunteer abroad. (I'm an EVS volunteer.) There are some really effective volunteers in the Balkans – they just tend not to be EVS. So what's wrong with us? And what can we do about it? These questions are important since thousands of young Europeans are now turning to EVS, given that it's free and available whereas good jobs are not.

My basic question is this: what is limiting the effectiveness of EVS volunteers in the Balkans? EVS stands for "European Voluntary Service," not "Unemployed Europeans Living Abroad." And yet we're all acting more like the latter. Going to the seminar in Macedonia made me realize a few reasons why EVS volunteers in the Balkans are more like free-fallers than ground-breakers.

1. Expectations. The expectations of young people beginning an EVS voluntary service in the Balkans are grotesquely off-mark. In my opinion, the most basic flaw with EVS is that the volunteers arrive expecting to be assigned tasks. When I arrived in Split with the other volunteers, my boss ("boss") literally said, "There's work here for you to do. But if you want to sleep all day and party on the beach all night, you're free to make that choice."

    The truth is that organization in the Balkans is slack. Take the seminar I went to – we barely even discussed the theme that was supposed to underlie the whole training. People go with the flow around here, and the flow changes. EVS volunteers in the Balkans have to be go-getters in order to achieve anything. Nobody tells them that before-hand. Nobody teaches them how to be a go-getter once they arrive. I think Balkan NGO's expect EVS volunteers to arrive as go-getters, but this comes as a shock to many volunteers who come expecting to be lead around by hand. This is partly the fault of EVS info sessions, where potential volunteers are told they will have mentors, language lessons, contracts, and assignments. On paper, this is all true. The reality is another story.

So EVS candidates are given unrealistic expectations about what it's like to volunteer in the Balkans. It follows that the wrong kinds of people wind up here as volunteers. There are EVS volunteers who are only 18 or 19 years old. They've just finished high school. They're used to teachers checking their homework and parents telling them to clean their rooms. And now, without any forewarning or instruction, they're expected to create a community newspaper or recruit language students in Montenegro. Maybe it would be possible if they were under closer supervision by a boss-like figure telling them what to do. But in the Balkans, EVS volunteers are not told what to do. We're volunteers, ain't nobody gonna waste their precious time holding our hands.

2. Funding. Continuing from the previous sentence: in the eyes of Balkan NGO's, we're just volunteers. Many organizations take on EVS volunteers because the EU gives them money for it. All the EVS-promotion-police will hunt me down for publishing this. But Balkan NGO's enroll in EVS because volunteers bring in money. The employees have neither the time nor the interest to really train us. We're money-makers. And when we're treated like young kids trying to find some "direction" in life by having fun in another country for a few months, then that's exactly how we'll act.

3. Duration. Okay, maybe I have an over-ambitious interpretation of what EVS volunteers should be able to achieve. EVS voluntary terms are relatively short – sometimes as little as three months. As pointed out to me by a participant at the seminar, three months is by no means long enough to impact a foreign community. It's not even enough for the volunteer to get to know the community.

Volunteers with Peace Corps (a program for Americans) have two-year terms. When I first hear this, it sounded impossibly long. Two years in Croatia? Holy Split. And that's the second-biggest city in the country. Imagine being stuck for two years in a village in Mongolia. Let's say it takes four to six months to really get a feel for the community you've moved to. It takes about the same amount of time to get a feel for what kind of projects would benefit your community (and would be feasible to implement. A project for teaching people how to use Adobe Acrobat in a village that has no computers will not be too successful).

So a volunteer needs time to get to know the community before developing projects that will benefit the locals. Then the volunteer has to plan the project. This is not easy. You have to learn how and where to find partners, how and where to find funds. You have to learn how to write an application for a project. You have to find out what organizations to submit your application to, and by what deadlines. You might wait several months before you find out whether the project has been approved. In summary it's a joke to expect an EVS volunteer to achieve in 6 months what a Peace Corps volunteer, or a local organization, takes years to do. Especially when EVS volunteers are not even told that they can develop their own projects, let alone instructed in how to develop them.

4. Language. You're from Poland. You've been accepted to be an EVS volunteer in Serbia. You will help give art lessons to children at a local elementary school. You get to Serbia. You live in an apartment with one volunteer from Germany and another from Italy. You go to your first day on the job. You still haven't a clue about Serbian culture and haven't learned a word of the language. You meet the kids. You say in your broken English, "Hi! I'm Magda. I Polski." Blank stares.

    It takes a really long time to learn a language. In six or even twelve months, you can't expect to have learned perfect Bosnian. The lingua franca ends up being English. So both the volunteer and the community members are struggling to understand each other in a language that is not their own. The language barrier varies from person to person, place to place. And yes, it's up to the volunteer to learn the local language if he or she wants to make a real impact. But quality language courses usually aren't offered to volunteers in the Balkans, despite all the EVS promises. Many EVS volunteers continue to feel like outsiders and to feel unable to help locals because of the difficulty they have in expressing their ideas to each other. Volunteers from within the region have a lot more potential because they already speak the language and have an idea of the community's needs.

    I want to add something here. People don't like to take me seriously when I talk about language barriers because I can get by in a handful of languages. People get upset because they use the language barrier as an excuse for their struggles abroad, and my (relative) ease with language is a threat to their excuse. I really don't people taking out their frustration on me, because (a) it's absurd to get angry at someone for speaking foreign languages, since learning a language is a way of showing curiosity and respect for a culture; (b) I did a degree in linguistics, so of course it's easier for me to pick stuff up; (c) I actually study the languages I learn during my own free time, and if you studied hard you could learn German too; and most importantly (d) since I have some language experience, you should trust me when I agree that you have to know a language really, really well to be able to communicate effectively in it. I've learned some Croatian, and you can all say I speak it great, but even "great" in six months hasn't been enough to establish solid communication skills with the locals. So keep your excuse. It's a good one. EVS volunteers need either a lot more time or a lot more language training to influence more than a few people in their community.

    There are many reasons why EVS volunteers in particular tend to sit at home thinking, Geez what to do with myself today. Part of the problem is that the EVS program in the Balkans doesn't sufficiently empower us. I've listed some explanations above. But part of the problem is that we're not empowering ourselves. Okay I may be a high-expectations kind of person, but I'm not saying anyone has to change the world. I'm simply saying that if no one will lead us, then we should lead ourselves. If volunteering in the Balkans teaches us anything, then let it be self-empowerment.

    These blogs are getting really long and specific.