The universe of volunteering: a space at Entre mundos
For: LILA ICKS
The volunteering universe is full of experiences incomparably enriching for those who have interest in entering and volunteering with open mind and heart.
To be a volunteer implies will, and this comes from wanting to make a difference in society, until understanding that the difference that is made, will look at times, a point on a line that adds or subtracts to that line of development; this sum or subtraction will depend on different factors like: the cause in which you’re participating, the commitment based on an analysis of abilities, knowledge, limitations, and strengths from everywhere based on your own experience, as well as the opening to understand the context of the rest of the parts, self knowledge as volunteer to respond to the specific necessities of the sector in which you are involved.
Volunteering is an integral experience; of personal, professional, human, and spiritual growth that naturally offers opportunity to connect distinct realities, which have nothing to do with nationalities. As individual human beings, we are a world and from the moment in which an individual integrates into a context different from the personal, the process of interchange and better interconnection begins.
It’s at this point where the volunteering universe offers the space to be able to exchange experiences, knowledge, skills, ideas, perceptions and feelings that give each as a result a world more interconnected and sensitized. It allows the creation of interpersonal relations based on solidarity and tolerance of difference; it’s a door to another level of consciousness that carries a lot of understanding and interest in learning and doing, not only to see and judge, breaking the scheme of the masses that reproduces based on the human condition of its relation with itself and other species, as well as with its natural environment, based on vertical economic and political interests. On the contrary, volunteers are going to join horizontal processes that search for an endogenous development and where indifference does not prevail. EntreMundos is a clear example of this and as is very well represented in the name of the organization, volunteering is like a gift that replicates and echoes from one point to different points in the world, we are part of the same planet but live Between Worlds.
Questions like: Where? How? When? Who? Why? are fundamental to understand the different contexts. It doesn’t limit us to coexist and put labels on so many social problems for speculation, stereotypes or bad information. It’s important that the individual who decides to enter the enriching volunteering adventure questions, makes their own investigation and that one of their objectives be to understand, not to deduce.
As Volunteer Program Coordinator at EntreMundos and based on my enriching experience inside this great organization (and I say this sincerely) I feel confident to invite you to open the door and enter the volunteering world. EntreMundos is an organization with feet, hands, body, head and above all a big heart that works on the whole so that Guatemala (but also for all of us who inhabit the planet) generates positive impacts, and extends the ties that unite us, but that sometimes distance us.
The volunteer program at EntreMundos has a database of more than 100 local organizations in which you have the opportunity to get involved, the input of the volunteer enriches the receiving organization always what is done with a true commitment and people become aware of the paper that is played in the development of the vulnerable sector. It is worth highlighting that what the volunteer receives from this experiences has no words, price nor description. You only need to have an open mind and heart, and you will get it when encouraging to live between worlds
