Volunteer Tales: Experiences of Working Abroad - A review - Leah Selinger

Volunteer Tales aims to provide the overseas volunteer with a taste of what it might be like, and does a pretty good job! Edited by two ex-volunteers, this anthology of tales and stories from volunteers around the world, the book ranges from tales of first impressions of strange places to experiences of the frustrations and rewards of the volunteer experience.

The range of experiences is vast, from the exhaustions of travel, to hospital experiences; from teaching tips to the problems that one might face in interactions with other people at work or play. The tales are of varying lengths and styles, including poems and diary entries, but all have a very real and identifiable aspect to the ex-volunteer, yet the volunteer-to-be may find some of the stories a little bizarre; a volunteer in Ethiopia is told that “People clap for waiters. It is okay to hit children you don’t know. Women don’t run or jump” among other cultural rules, while a volunteer “dodges people and cows and goats, and scooters and auto-rickshaws, and horse buggies and buses and people spitting out of those buses and water buffalo” on his way home in India.

This book will appeal to both the experienced and the potential volunteer, to reminisce and prepare respectively. The accounts are honest and revealing, but at the same time demonstrate the positive and valuable effects that volunteering gives both the volunteer and the community they choose to work in. The final section in the book demonstrates what the text as a whole seeks to prove; that “Volunteering changed everything”.