Some outcomes from doing volunteering

This is the first cohort in which I am part of this experience as a volunteer, like most of everyone here. The main thing I want to talk about on this blog is the way I found out about this job, which today is so important to me. 

First I met Raquel on 2013 on a conference she and another volunteer from UpClose where giving to the students studying biology in UMSA, where they showed some results from the job they were doing, in this conference they mentioned some of the other projects they had going on, one of those was free English classes in a school in Mallasa. This class was especially prepared for the kids of the school but also for interested people (like me), and because my English was so terrible back then I decided to go and there I met my first English teachers Ana Cossio from Bolivia and as UK volunteers Laura, Kay and Jonathan, they taught us with so much patience and affection that they really made an impact on me. After them the teachers were Adriana as a Bolivian volunteer and as UK volunteers Greg, Anna and Huw, from whom I´ve learned so much and I remember very fondly. This was such an eye opening experience that I found myself motivated to do some of the volunteering work they did, this is how during three months on the weekends of 2014 I became a volunteer working on the Porvenir Foundation, that works with kids with  disabilities through hippotheraphy. 

At the end of last year, I was so interested on taking English classes again with the volunteers, I contacted my teacher Adriana who instead - giving me a big surprise- offered me to work as a volunteer with her, this surprise got me thinking of course because I knew this meant giving a lot of my time that at that moment I didn´t really have but this news came like a shock to me, thinking how my English teacher is offering this to me without any type of personal gain, arouse in me a real desire to help my country in any possible way, and even if this doesn´t mean we are eliminating inequality, I know there´s more people who, by the job that is being done, get motivated to help others too. This way, more and more people become part of the chain that needs to grow so that this world becomes a better place every day.

It is very important for me to show that the fruits of your job as volunteers-and now mine too- does actually have the impact that we are all hoping to make (either big or small). I feel thankful; there are people like you on the other side of the world that feel interested on what happens on this side. 

Now, in the team I work with I’m really happy and content, because in the Childhood and Youth Empowerment project, in some way we work to try to get the children to improve their lifestyles and I really enjoy this, especially when I see the kids enjoying the activities we do with them, just like I enjoyed the classes I had and the way they prepared it for us.