My favorite way to travel is through humanitarian trips and volunteering abroad. I want to start using my blog to share information on how to volunteer and be an effective volunteer, as well as share my own personal experiences and what I learn through those. To start, I'm going to share an essay I wrote in my English class last year. In it I talk about my own experiences while serving abroad as well as what I've noticed is helpful and what is not. Today something called volunteerism is becoming more and more popular. People are traveling to developing countries all around the world to help out. But do they really help? Many of these people don't have any important skills needed to help people and lots of them end up simply there to take photos and not positively impacting the community that they went to help. In the following pages I am going to talk about my experiences on my humanitarian trips serving in other countries and how to serve in a way that can help the community.
I remember it like it was yesterday. In the summer of 2017, when I was 15 years old, my mom dropped me and my dad off to the airport so that we could board our plane. We were going to Uganda on a humanitarian trip, it’s something I had dreamed about doing for years. When we arrived in Uganda I was really happy to be there but I was also nervous because it was my first trip outside of the US. I was shocked to see how people live. I don't think anything could have prepared me for the poverty I witnessed. On the first day there we drove for 7 hours across the country to a city named Mbale, where we were doing most of the humanitarian work. On the way there we drove through some slums. My perspective on life changed as I looked out the window during the drive. We drove through the capital city Kampala with old buildings and trash everywhere on the street. We drove through slums where kids younger than me were working with their own child strapped to their backs. I saw women walking barefoot on rocky ground with jugs of water on their heads and I saw houses made out of nothing but logs, rocks and mud. In Mbale I was able to help out with a lot of projects. We helped finish a well and a school that was paid for by our group. We also taught a sex education class for the youth at a local high school and a business class for women, especially single mothers, in a rural village. I loved being able to help with those projects. It taught me a lot about the needs I took for granted. Water, food, health, education, careers and opportunities. One of the projects I loved the most was when we finished building the well and had an opening ceremony for it. It was the first project we did. The well was the first project we worked on. It was in the middle of large slum and before we built it people had to walk for miles to a nearby lake to get water. Before this day I had not been in a slum before so it was quite an eye opening experience to see how these people lived. When I first stepped out of our van after arriving here a young, small child came up to me and held by hand. She stayed with me almost the whole time. The experiences I had during those projects were really meaningful to me. Those projects were amazing but they weren't the ones I enjoyed the most. Our group also planned and held two health clinics. One in a remote, mountainous village and one in an orphanage. Both of these places were far away from any sort of medical care. We hired doctors to come, then helped distribute the medication and get the information we needed from them beforehand. A ton of people showed up. They were really sick and badly needed medical care. Because of my age I didn't have the skills to help with much but I really wanted to make myself useful. So I asked if I could be taught to do something. I was then taught how to use a vital signs kit and given the task of taking people's blood pressure. It was stressful, but I enjoyed it. Because they were so malnourished. A lot of people had arms so skinny that the velcro went passed it because they were so malnourished, so I had to hold the cuff in place. I felt very comfortable working in the clinic environment. I have since gone on two other humanitarian trips. The next one was the summer of 2018. I went to Thailand with a youth humanitarian organization. We built another building on an orphanage property. I spent 7 hours each day on weekdays helping build the orphanage for two weeks straight. We laid cement, installed the roof, laid bricks for the walls, etc. It was hard work but it was worth it in the end when I got to see the look on all the young orphans faces as they were introduced to the room. Besides building the orphanage my group also helped give English classes to another orphanage and we spent some time playing with the orphans as well. This was really special to me because most of them don't get a lot of interaction with people other than those that worked at the orphanage. The last trip I went on was in the summer of 2019. I went to Paraguay with the same humanitarian organization as last year but this time my dad came with me again which was a lot of fun. We built an addition to a school for a community on an Indian reserve. After building the building the amount of kids that could come to the school had tripled. This was my favorite humanitarian trip because unlike my one in Uganda where we were constantly moving around to work on different projects and Thailand where the orphans we were building for were really young and didn't really understand why we were there, we got to play with the children in Paraguay on a daily basis on our lunch break at the work site and I was able to develop a personal relationship with a lot of time. You could see how happy they were to have us there and how excited they were for the school to be built. I remember a lot of the children there and I miss them a lot. I hope to go back and visit them one day. Those were both also incredible experiences. But as I was working on those projects my thoughts sometimes drifted back to my time in Uganda when I was able to help in the health clinic. I loved being able to work in the health clinic and take people's blood pressure. As well as observe medical professionals that were able to treat the sick people. I want to do more to help in that way. I feel like those trained in the medical field have the skills needed to really help people. I had always known that I wanted a career that would allow me to help people on a daily basis but it wasn't until after my humanitarian trips that I decided that I wanted to work in the medical field. That way I will have some skills needed to be able to save people and really make a difference in their lives. I am now taking a CNA program in school and after that I will probably go into nursing in college. Then I plan on volunteering on many humanitarian trips wherever I am needed as well as working in a hospital or care facility and helping people in my own community. That experience is how I found my life's purpose. Everyone has a way they can help others. Find that gift and use it. There are so many ways you can help. We need people that can help educate those that do not have the opportunity to go to school, we need people to help care and treat the people that are sick and injured, we need people to help tend to land so that they are able to grow food on it, etc. With that being said there are also some things people do that they think are helping but that really damages the community so you need to be careful with how you help. If you search for humanitarian opportunities you will be able to find some great ones that positively impact the community but there are also the ones that can negatively impact it. For example some organizations go to poor countries and hand out a lot of clothes and supplies to people and while this might seem like a good idea it causes people to become dependent on constant supplies being given to them. I witnessed this in Uganda. When we went to the school to help finish the kitchen the children there came up to us to greet us and immediately asked “what you have for us.” When we told them we were here to finish the kitchen so that they could get better school lunches a few of them got angry. They asked for toys and candy because other people brought those to them last time they visited. Another example would be how people can sometimes go volunteer in an orphanage in another country for a few weeks with no other purpose then to play with the children. This can have bad effects because the kids being played with constantly have new people coming into play with them. They form bonds with the volunteers only to have them taken away from them and replaced with a new face. This can make them upset and cause them to develop a fear of creating relationships because they think that all the people they form relationships with will be taken away from them. This summer I am planning to go to Greece to volunteer as a CNA and work in the refugee camps there. Many people are coming to Greece to flee from wars and need help. It is currently one of the largest humanitarian crises in the world. I want to work in camp Moria, Europe's largest refugee camp and I hope that I will have the opportunity to work under the supervision of a nurse who treats people when they first arrive at the camp. I'm really excited for the opportunity to put the skills I've been using to work in a country that really needs me.
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AuthorMy name is Care H. I love traveling and I love writing. I have decided to start blogging about my incredible travel experiences more often. I sometimes also post about other things that are not travel related but travel is the main theme. Three things that I love to write about are travel, LGBTQI+ topics and helping others, including humanitarian and volunteer abroad experiences. I have also posted about things I've experienced while working as a CNA, mental health issues and life accomplishments.
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