The importance of international volunteerism
Editorial
Guyana Chronicle
December 5, 2003
EVERY Guyanese accepts the truism that affirms the country's future dependence on the full involvement of youth sectors.
It is this factor that reminds of the great importance of International Volunteers Day, which is commemorated today.
Over the past decades, international volunteers have participated in several areas of national activity. These personnel were made welcome by the 1953 PPP administration: at that time volunteers were mainly identified with church groups such as the Seventh-Day Adventists. The British Council also sponsored teachers, doctors, engineers and soil specialists.
During the 1960s the Peace Corps of the United States of America, established under the direction of Mr. Pat Shriver, President Kennedy's brother-in-law, were visibly active in several countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America.
That period and its cold war undertones up until the present, carries serious implications of a political nature in countries where the Criminal Investigation Agency (CIA) and other US intelligence arms launched covert activities.
Since then, international volunteer organizations, as institutions, have been forged in numerous sub-areas. These include UNESCO Friends Club, the Japanese Hiroshima/Nagasaki Peace Groups (both providing Cadres Teaching Pedagogy and Peace Behaviour), the Campaign for Nuclear Disbarment or CND (community and mass anti-war education and tactics), the International Solidarity Brigadistas based in Cuba (youth leaders and activists engaged in development works on the Cuban countryside) and the Youth Federation of the former GDR, the FDJ. The FDJ worked in Vietnam, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Yemen, Tanzania and other countries on construction projects.
In many cases these volunteers contributed to the cause of peace, friendship and solidarity. Cultural and social development in all of these countries across the world registered advances as one consequence of the volunteer service and provision of quality skills.
The New Paradigm - The Guyana Youth Challenge, together with the British Voluntary Services, the United Nations Volunteers and local non-governmental organizations, especially the Guyana Responsible Parenthood Association - is currently engaged in delivering units of resource and sustainable skills.
Activities related to classroom instruction and community networking, have been important aspects of projects undertaken over the past decade or so. The value-added volunteers' input, therefore, should never be underestimated or under-valued.
At the same time it would be advisable for the Guyanese authorities to disengage a praxis that actually works over the short-term and reproduces long-term nation-building attributes.
Much has been written about the new market paradigm that must be a major concern for a reform driven process of development.
In this regard we could cite the programmes linked to Greenpeace volunteers, where specially qualified and experienced graduates and technicians have worked to produce researchers and report findings of tremendous importance. Not only have these carried a focus on the environment, additionally, Greenplace activities merged at the level of lifestyle compatibility and the management of trauma arising from prolonged depression and stagnation (example, water user and house-boat residents as well as mariners).
The regional Sparks of Peace Projects, launched by Caribbean youth representatives fours years ago, as well as the proposed follow up Youth Enterprise Development proceeding from conferences in Barbados, Suriname and The Bahamas, should all be weighed, measured and evaluated in greater depth.
In this way, international volunteers drawn from a number of countries within the hemisphere can make a dramatic contribution to the struggle against poverty and sexually transmitted diseases, including that of HIV/AIDS. It would be a waste of potential and capital to proceed along the same, already covered series of rural/hinterland activities year after year, season after season.