I was recently wondering how my life had changed since I first heard the word “volunteering”.
I remember I was still in high school when I was told that completing “social service” was a graduation requirement. I chose to give some hours at the emblematic Virgilio Barco Library in Bogotá. At the time I didn't really understand why, or what that time would be good for, instead of spending it on more important things like basketball, my friends and family trips. I just thought it would at least be an excellent chance to read a lot of books over those holidays.
The holidays went by and before I knew it those 80 hours of social service were coming to an end. By then I had grown familiar with a place I didn't know, I had grown fond of the endless aisles of books, I had classified and sorted hundreds of volumes, I had made a couple of friends (the dearest was Pity, whom I always remember with infinite affection and from whom I still keep a tiny little alligator hair clip, and who would later be connected to the world of music and to other beloved people who came into my life), but above all, I had stayed SILENT most of my time there (obviously, being a library). I had the chance to think a great deal about what I was going to do with the rest of my life — ha ha ha, the truth is volunteering takes you to unsuspected places — and it helped me get ready for those last months before graduating from high school.
A new world opened up for me there, where I understood that volunteering had brought a lot of new things into my life that, “out of obligation”, became a delight during that time.
I came back to school from the holidays with a lot of experiences and, years later, my unconscious — though I think it was more conscious than I care to admit — looked for a way to leave the country through the volunteering program. I arrived at Icye Colombia in 2004. And so, at 19, I boarded a plane with a backpack and a thousand hopes, heading to a social project in the city of Loughborough (United Kingdom).
In PART TWO of this blog, I'll tell you how that experience went.