IN THE HEAD OF A VOLUNTEER: WHY AM I HERE?

A volunteer life is kind of strange. You are leaving your friends, family, and relationships to go somewhere else in the world where nobody knows you and where you know nobody. And usually you don’t even understand when people are talking to you. To most people, my grandparents included, this description would have made them run the other way, but here I am. 

Here is a short story to get into the head of a french volunteer, 23 years old, freshly graduated from a psychology master degree, who left her life, family, friends, possible job and boyfriend to volunteer in Rustavi, Georgia for a year. 

The first question I feel I need to answer is “Why ?”. Well the problem with this question is that i don’t really find a correct answer. Of course I can explain it to you the same way I explained it to my friends and family over and over again. “I want to move abroad and experience life in another country by living in it and I also want to experience volunteering work with children to make it easier to find a job in this field when I come back home”. And that would be a truthful answer. But I feel, and I know, that there is more to the story. 

First of all, some part of the reason was mere stubbornness and fear of regrets. I always told myself, and people around me, that I liked visiting a country as a tourist but that I always went home with the impression of missing something by not living like a local. 

With that idea in mind I went to the Erasmus reunion in my university to try to go abroad for a year during my studies. I went there with some doubts, I was afraid of leaving halfway and missing the last years of studies with my friends. I also badly wanted to access the psycho-criminology master's degree and I needed high grades to get there. In this reunion they said that I needed to repass an English exam (which wasn’t cheap by the way) and that sometimes the grades abroad were strangely translated and I could end up with average grades. So, of course, I took the opportunity to retract, these arguments giving me good excuses to stay in the comfort of my habits and finish my studies normally. 

Maybe you already understood it from my Erasmus story but I am someone who really, really, really likes things to stay the same. As a child I cried every time I needed to adapt to something new (I still do it as an adult). So how did I end up there ? Well this aspect of my personality is kind of the reason why. If I followed my emotions about change I would let my mom decide every step of my life without questions (so much easier).  But I already did that for 90% of my life and, even if she has great advice, I wanted to start making decisions, sometimes harder ones, by myself. So what better challenge than to move somewhere completely new where my habits would need to change radically and where I could reinvent (or invent) myself to start my adult life the way I want it to be? 

For me, the timing to come here was better appropriate than an Erasmus year in the middle of my studies because I was already stressed out by my graduation and having to decide where to move and where to work. My friends all had changes of their own so I needed to deal with it either way. I could finally challenge myself and discover a country from within like I always said I would. If you ask my friends and family, and even me, I think none of us believed I would do it, or that it was real, until I was on the plane. Well now it is real, and I am here so stay tuned to see me learn about Georgia, volunteer work, and myself :)