Returned volunteers

Reunion

If you were at the reunion in May 2003 and would like to see the official photographs please click here.  If you have problems downloading the photos please email me.
 

Contact Us
Are you a returned development worker who has lost touch with us?


Our volunteers from the past 50 years

We are keen for returned volunteers to get in touch with us.  Some of those who have done share accounts of their time abroad below.  If you would like to submit a profile please contact Charlotte on 01904 647799 or by email

Bryan Sanderson CBE Chief Executive, BUPA
Rosemary Green Retired 
Candy Whittome Co-Director, British Institute of Human Rights
Jan Rocha  Brazil Correspondent, The Guardian
Tom Addiscott  Soil Scientist

Our current volunteers

Currently our volunteers work in Bolivia, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Mali and Palestine.  Click on the name below to read about their experiences.

Alison Dunn Burkina Faso
Nicole Freris Brazil
Ross Georgeson Palestine
Hamish Osbourn Bolivia
Gill Myers Bolivia
Sue Upton Mali
 

There were about 20 volunteers in total who left for various parts of South America on a ship from Liverpool in the autumn of 1963. It was a stormy day and I’m not much of a sailor, we went down through the Bay of Biscay and I was violently ill; the knowledge that I still had another 19 days to go didn’t fill me with optimism but it got smoother and the South Atlantic was a dream.
There were a small group of us, most of whom worked in a ‘barriada’ or shanty town on the outskirts of Lima helping to install electricity and drainage. I was sent off on my own to live and teach economics in a small town called Ica which is about 400 km south of Lima. A small cotton growing town in the desert. Desperately poor and arid but with the compensations of wonderfully friendly people and the spectacular scenery of the foothills of the Andes.

I lived in a small mud and cement house that had a single light bulb that worked for about one hour a day and no running water. Most of these houses had about eight children in the small space that I only shared with one other man.
Happiness is difficult thing to define, although the people were poor they didn’t know anything else of the outside world to compare their lives to, so they were happy. They liked to party and they loved football – which provided a great icebreaker, about the only thing they knew about England was that football came from there. I taught Economics in a University that had been created out of an old convent school. Mostly people were there to learn to read and write so that they could get better jobs for themselves.
My Spanish was sketchy, I learnt the economic language pretty thoroughly, but I did have trouble asking for a pint of beer. I discovered that I could quite often get away with the Spanish by remembering either the French or the Latin word and just sticking a Spanish ending onto it. But it didn’t always work, on one occasion I tried to tell the class that I was embarrassed about forgetting the word for “sugar” by using “embarazada” – it turned out that I had just informed them all that I was pregnant.

I had a really good time, Peru didn’t yet have guerrillas but it was nevertheless a very lawless place. The students were on strike a lot; nearly 60 per cent of all the hours I was supposed to teach were lost through strikes. Quite often the University was occupied and on one occasion I was trapped in there for two days, luckily I was let out by one of my students before the riot started. We lost a lot of the summer vacation because students had to come during this time to catch up with the lectures they had missed.
Something that I realised, and that has never left me, is the understanding of what it is to live in a country were you have practically no rights, just enough food, no medical treatment, high infant mortality. The stench of poverty is something that they can never show on newsreels. There was extreme urban poverty, little sanitation and a huge amount of flies. I learnt the real meaning of the word “empathy” there.

I returned to the UK and joined BP, where I ended up staying for the rest of my career; I worked all over the world and led the company into Asia where my experience of the third world was very valuable in helping me relate to the ambitions and problems of developing countries. I married in 1966 to a Swedish lady, to whom I am still married. I was also keen on politics but eventually made the decision that I was a better businessman than politician. I went to business school in Switzerland and moved up the career ladder with BP and eventually became a Group Managing Director.
I retired at 60 and decided that I wanted to do something very different so I became involved with the establishment of the Learning Skills Council. As well as my involvement with this I also work as the part-time Chairman of BUPA. Most importantly I was invited to chair Sunderland p.l.c. when my local football club went public. Mixing tribal passion and business sense is presenting new challenges!

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It was fascinating to see some of the technical side of constructing a house, and I soon discovered that mixing cement was a pretty tough job. On Saturday nights there was usually a party. Everyone was encouraged to join in the dancing, and the volunteers would perform various sketches and songs making everyone laugh. Language, or lack of it, didn’t matter on such occasions.

Returning to London to find a job, I found myself working at UNAIS during the summer of 1959, which had been designated World Refugee Year. One of the aims was to clear the refugee camps in Europe which had been in existence since the Second World War. In mid-1963 my application to go to Austria as a long-term volunteer was accepted, and I went back to Linz.
My work included visiting refugee families - many of whom lived in other parts of Austria - and reporting on their progress to friends in the UK who were contributing financially to their welfare through an “adoption” scheme.

But first of all I was expected to spend some time at a camp, and I was allocated to a family in the small Upper Austrian town of Eferding. This was quite different from my earlier experience at Wegscheid – there were just three of us, living on site with a family struggling to build a rather large house. They all slept in one room in the old barrack where they were living until the new house was habitable.
We lived in an old shed – the two girls slept upstairs (I still don’t know why the place didn’t collapse), while the man had a camp bed in the windowless “kitchen”. I shall never forget the day we had to line the septic tank with cement – it had to be done in one day to avoid any chance of cracks. The mixer was ancient and temperamental, weighted down with bricks. The bags of cement were incredibly heavy, and progress was slow. But somehow we succeeded.
Another of my tasks, along with other volunteers, was to help refugee families and elderly folk move from the wooden barracks where they had spent the last 20 years or so to new flats in various areas around Linz, which had been constructed as part of the UNHCR’s camp-clearance programme for World Refugee Year. Moving was a traumatic experience especially for some of the more elderly refugee women who found themselves separated from neighbours they had known ever since their arrival in Austria, and they were often lonely. Most of them received only a meagre pension which did not allow them to buy furniture or a stove for heating their new apartments, so, with grants given for the purpose, we would help them buy these basic necessities.
 
After a few months living in a barrack at Wegscheid, (where we felt very lucky to have one tap with running water!) the group of volunteers based in Linz moved to a house acquired by UNA for use as a community centre. The Kinderheim (so called as it had originally been built by the Swedish Mission as a children’s home) and the nearby Community Centre were used for a variety of activities for refugees living locally.
Most of the volunteers had left Linz by December 1964. During the following year, UNA’s activities in Austria were gradually taken over by local social workers, as the various NGOs which had been working in the country for so many years were obliged to withdraw.

Certainly my time with UNA in Linz played an important role in my life and I still have close friends there whom I visit whenever possible. Soon after my return from Linz at the end of 1964, I came to Geneva where I spent most of the rest of my working life. I have been lucky to have had plenty of opportunity to travel, gaining at least a glimpse of life in many different countries and meeting people from all over the world.

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The route to Ramallah from Epsom was, perhaps, not obvious. The first chink of light to cast doubt on the manufactured robustness of my suburban upbringing was through a teacher in primary school who spent one rainy October afternoon giving us an unexpurgated account of ‘the Troubles’ in Northern Ireland. She raised doubts in my mind that could not be glibly resolved.

Falling into human rights law twelve years later was a lucky accident, prompted simply by seeing an advertisement for a new course in the subject. From the day it started I never doubted that this was the work I wanted to do, and the opportunity to do human rights law in a place where it really mattered, in Palestine, was an extraordinary gift.
Al-Haq was the inspiration of Raja Shehadeh, a commercial lawyer from Ramallah, who used the tools of his trade - accuracy and objectivity - to cement the organisations’ position as one of the world’s leading human rights NGOs by virtue of its relentlessly thorough approach to fact-finding and its studied application of international law to the facts it gathered. In the international arena we were honoured by a US President, sought after by European ambassadors and saw the UN Security Council rely on our reports in drawing up its resolutions. The daily reality was different, as the office was routinely harassed and threatened by the Israeli authorities, denied telephone lines to facilitate our work, and significantly disrupted by the arrest and (administrative) detention of one or more of our fieldworkers.

At the time it was six months into the ‘first’ intifada, a time of real hope in the face of shocking hardship. Curfews were frequent – and you soon learned to distinguish the serious ones from the ones no one much bothered about. Those were the ones where you walked to work through the fields, far away from the soldiers, dodging into bushes when a jeep drove past, through the barbed wire fences, ducking when you heard the high, crisp ‘crack’ that meant live ammunition (as opposed to the thicker, duller thud of rubber bullets), and finally into the office building. Those were the days when only the foreigners – three or four of us - could get to work; it was simply too risky for everyone else. We carried on when we could because that was part of the deal. The risks were just not the same - and ultimately we could, and would leave.
But it was the petty humiliations of daily life under occupation which struck me most. Driving home with Issa’ one day, the gentlest soul you could ever meet, we were stopped by soldiers who demanded that he get out and hand them his identity papers. One grasped Issa’s chin in his hand jerking it roughly into the light, before letting him go reluctantly, but keeping his papers. A minor, trifling annoyance. But for Issa, once again, he was treated as an object and an unwelcome one. Not to mention that without his papers he was liable to arrest anytime any soldier stopped him again.
This ritual of confiscating papers, then arresting those without, was one of the most routine complaints we heard at Al-Haq’s legal advice centre, where I worked for three years with the staff to develop and expand the service so we could reach all those who needed us, not just those who lived in or around Ramallah. A simple letter to the Military Authority would, more often than not, do the trick, and the papers would be returned. But the practice continued - a simple but effective way of emphasising who was in control.

On a personal level, I lived comfortably in a ground-floor flat rented from a kind elderly couple who were often bewildered and frightened by the routine degradation they faced as they did their shopping, went to pray in the mosque, or travelled to hospital for regular appointments. Their stoicism, courage and kindness were not unusual.
In a situation where poverty was real, personal safety often threatened and material deprivation a way of life, friendships - across national boundaries, with Palestinians, Israelis and other ‘foreigners’ - were rich, readily made, and one of the greatest rewards of my time there.
After about three months living and working in Ramallah, I wrote back to my mother – ‘nobody told me how bad things were here – why didn’t I know?’ That sense of shame still haunts me. Eleven years later things have changed. It would be easy to be hopeless; the so-called ‘peace process’ has come, and it has gone. That was not the moment. But what gives me hope, finally, is that word has started to get out. The mainstream broadsheet press is now beginning to report what it sees on the ground, and opinions are, however slowly, starting to shift. In the meantime too many lives on all sides will be lost or damaged, and another generation has lost its childhood.

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While at Edinburgh I became interested in Brazil. After a year as a caseworker with the Spastics Society (as it was then called), I applied to UNAIS to become a long term volunteer, with my eye on the vacancy for a social worker in Brazil. I already spoke reasonable Portuguese after living for 8 months in Portugal.
As the ship left Tilbury Docks for the two week voyage to South America, Land of Hope and Glory thundered out over the loudspeaker......it was an emotional moment for the volunteers aboard, because we were going away for two years and in those days the only communication was by letter.
In Rio I was replacing Janet Dale. Sent out to teach at the English School in São Paulo she decided this was not what she had volunteered to do and instead got herself a job with the agency Catholic Relief Service in Rio. We were part of a team assessing development projects and writing reports on them for funding agencies like Oxfam.
I began to travel all over Brazil and on these trips I often met Peace Corps volunteers. There were 600 of them in Brazil and they always asked “so how many of you are there here ? to which the embarrassing answer was “Two” (the other one, Judy Radcliffe, worked at a children’s orphanage in Salvador).

In my second year I moved to Belem, the Amazon port, where I lived in a boarding house full of eccentric characters, among them a doctor who carried a pet lizard on his shoulder, a whisky smuggler, and a painter who had run away from her husband. There was also a young lawyer, Plauto Rocha, who later became my husband. The pensao was inhabited by armies of rats, ants and cockroaches.
I had to make frequent trips to the Island of Marajo in the mouth of the Amazon river, to evaluate projects. Sometimes we travelled in tiny planes and landed in the main street of the village, the only runway. Mostly we travelled overnight in small boats that often got caught in the sudden storms that blew up in the bay and threatened to overturn us.
Three more UNAIS volunteers came to join me in Belem and together we organised the first ever student volunteer project, taking medical, nursing and social work students to a village on the island to provide health care. The students continued the project for several years.
Communications with the UNAIS office in London were precarious, letters often got lost and e-mail and even fax had yet to be invented. Phones were only used for local calls. We had to solve any problems that arose ourselves.

On return from Brazil I got a job as a researcher with the Kings Fund in London and wrote a report on the expansion of organisers of voluntary help in hospitals, published in 1967.
In 1969, now married, we returned to live in São Paulo. I continued with voluntary work. For two years I organised the work of a team of volunteers at a large state orphanage. In 1978 I helped to found an ecumenical group of volunteers, known as Clamor which worked with refugees fleeing from the military dictatorships in Argentina, Uruguay, Chile and Paraguay. But from 1974 I became a news correspondent, at first for the BBC World Service, then for The Guardian and other papers, radios and TV. I have also written several books about aspects of Brazil. My three children are now grown-up, and although they have all lived in England, they identify more with Brazil than with the UK.

Looking back at my time as a UNAIS volunteer, I think it opened my eyes to another reality and gave me a fantastic chance to get to know another country, which ended up becoming mine too. In some ways it was more of a learning experience for us, the volunteers, than a useful contribution to the local population. But it is interesting to see that in the last few years, the idea of volunteering has caught on within Brazil and now there are 100s of projects all over the country.

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About a month before we left for Tanganyika, we and a lot of other volunteers descended on a lady’s teacher training college in Putney for a week’s orientation course. Those of us deemed ‘agricultural’ went the following week to Oxford to learn about tropical agriculture. As I had just finished my studies there, this provided a convenient opportunity for me to drop in to check whether I had a degree, but that had somehow become less important than going to Tanganyika.

We left Heathrow in September 1964 in a temperature of 90 °F and landed at Nairobi the following morning with the thermometer on 55 °F. After a trip round the game-park, we flew to Arusha over a hot, hilly landscape, the thermals from which did extraordinary things with our little aeroplane and our stomachs. As we drove into Arusha from the airport, I got my first glimpse of a shantytown, without understanding what it was. Our destination was the Institute where we were to spend a month learning Swahili. I found it logical and not too difficult to learn, but after 38 years not too much remains with me.
We had an idyllic month at Tengeru, which lies close to the foot of Mount Meru (4566m) and about 50 miles from Kilimanjaro (5895m). A group of us tried to climb Meru, but only one out of 15 got to the top. We were mortified to learn that the local school children went to the top regularly as an outing. At the end of the month we went our separate ways to do what we had came to do.

Ukiriguru, my ultimate destination, was a great place to live. It was set in the rolling Sukumaland countryside, which was reminiscent of Sussex. Being 4000 feet above sea level near Lake Victoria, it had an agreeable climate – and a supply of fresh fish from the lake. More importantly, there was plenty of work for me to do, studying the behaviour of phosphate in local soils. Best of all there were quite a few other volunteers there. We all got on very well and I remember a very international Christmas under the sun. It was definitely one of the best experiences of my life – both enjoyable, and productive from a work point of view.

Particularly memorable were the two trips I made into the Serengeti game park with my housemate Robin. You can understand the magic of the Serengeti only if you have been there. My year out came to an end quickly enough, and it was time to go home. I thought about staying for another year, but I had told my family that it would be a year. I caught the train for a 45-hour journey down to Dar-es-Salaam to meet another volunteer. We took the ship round to Beira in Mozambique and back into colonial Africa, to Salisbury and then Johannesburg. We went to the cinema in the latter. I don’t remember much else – except waiting in the hot sun for a bus which we could not board. It had “Non-whites only” on the front. From there we hitched to Bloemfontein and then to Durban, out-of-season. Even the snakes in the Snake Park were half-asleep.

We meant to hitch from Durban to the Cape, but got only about 50 miles up the road on the first day. We retreated to Pietermaritzburg and waited two days for the train. I brought a Graham Greene at a second-hand bookshop. It seemed appropriate – it was a Graham Greene situation. The train, when it came, took three days to get to Cape Town, going via Kimberley, which looked grim. The Cape area was delightful, as were our hosts. Then thirteen days on the Windsor Castle to Southampton. England in October looked incredibly green. But it was 34 years before I went back to Africa.

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Current Development Workers

It was upon my arrival that I met International Service who took me on as a development worker and incorporated the project and I into their programme of work.

I found my time in Burkina to be a tremendous learning experience as I was shown the different villages and the people living there. I worked closely with the director of the project Lankoande Dialoaga who taught me about the problems that people here face and the different ways in which they try to solve them. All that I had to offer was my knowledge of fundraising methods and strategies and my recently acquired ‘ICA’ skills of working in participatory ways with groups of people. Together we organised research, training sessions and workshops with various groups of people – women, school children, teachers and disabled people. This was all quite a steep learning curve for me and I value the knowledge that I gained from this experience immensely. In return I hope that I helped the association to be more organised with their funding strategy, applications and financial administration. I feel like I played a major role in building the organisation. When I first arrived there were just 2 other people working on small awareness raising projects and school credit systems. Now we are a team of 11 people working on long term securely funded projects with programmes in the areas of disability, women’s rights and activities, nutrition, education and youth.

It took some time adjusting to the difference in culture and language and most of all the climate which is extreme with temperatures of up to 42° in the hot season and dust storms which cloud out the sun in the colder season. The solar panels on my house would sometimes fail to charge the battery needed to light my house at night or run my computer and sometimes my barrels ran out of water at the most inappropriate moments. The hardest thing I had to live through was to witness a drought two years in a row when the rains failed.

However, I also had the most rewarding moments of my life – it’s so satisfying when you hear news that funding has been approved, or when a women’s group are delighted with training in how to make clay cookers. Or when groups of disabled people start talking in public about what they want to see changed in their lives. For anyone wanting to work overseas in similar situations I would just say be completely flexible, have no fixed ideas about what you will do and learn before you do anything.

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My first experience as a volunteer overseas was an eight month placement to India with Action Health 2000 training health agents and running clinics in rural communities. After this, I felt ready to commit myself to a longer period overseas. Returning to the UK, while working as a GP registrar, I scanned the journals seeking the right opportunity – and it appeared; a post with UNAIS working with indigenous people in the Brazilian Amazon – perfect. I was thrilled with the idea of working with indigenous societies, within one of the most immense and diverse forests on the planet.

I was based in the urban sprawl of Manaus, although most of the time was spent on the rivers and in the indigenous villages where I worked with a team of Brazilian “indigenists”. However, it was clear from early on that my role as a western allopathic doctor was very limited. I spent more time discovering and learning than transferring my meagre skills.
My role has been that of a catalyst, identifying needs and bringing together resources to respond to those needs. With time I sought to address the environmental and social issues, so clearly the source of disease suffered by indigenous peoples, and in reality all human societies.

I began to understand the complex mess causing ill health to both people and the planet; particularly the devastating impact of the global economy on indigenous peoples and their forest. In an attempt to address some of these issues, I have worked with local indigenous leaders to set up new organisation, Association Yakino, working to develop sustainable and just “indigenous” economies. More recently I became involved in initiatives with local farmers and riverside dwellers in alternative agriculture, specifically permaculture and appropriate technology.

After 10 years, I am now preparing to leave the region; I do not feel like it is a departure. The experience that UNAIS opened for me has transformed the way I think and perceive the world and myself. It is something that lives with me. One of the richest gifts has been the bonds and friendships with people from all walks of life – Indians, local farmers, riverside dwellers, and activists, all struggling in their way for a better world. It has been a privilege to be part of this alternative family.

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Ross Georgeson  Palestine
I started my placement with the Culture and Free Thought Association through in 1999, before then I was working in Scotland as a community artist. I had been working for some time with disadvantaged children and people with disabilities and mental health problems, though had never worked with refugees. The opportunity to see if I could offer something in a different culture was a challenging one.

Initially the placement was for two years. I have now been in the region for over three and a half. Events have conspired so that I have been able to work with a wide range of people and places. Projects have included vocational workshops in a psychiatric hospital, teaching children with visual impairment and training teachers in a school for children born with Downs Syndrome. With the help of a psychologist, we are running a course to train prospective teachers' attitudes and skills for working with children in difficult circumstances. I'm also intending to introduce printmaking as a new medium for artists and a tool for therapy in Gaza.

The highs and lows are closely linked - low points are what happen to people in this situation, the high points are what they can make happen in it. Hearing people that you have trained are now employed, finding something you've taught being done in a different city and having children and people respond and take further what you've shown them is always inspiring. Loss of hope, the 'one step forward, two steps back' that sometimes happens and the utter senselessness of a lot of things here is always depressing.

Saying that, I have gained a unique experience and greater knowledge of other people as well as myself, emotionally and professionally. If I have helped, I hope I've introduced some new ideas and skills and changed some attitudes to using creativity as a tool for development.

Adjustment is an ongoing process, particularly here. There is the arrival to a new place, culture, climate and job, which is never easy. Introducing anything requires adaptation and modification of all parties involved and is usually quite tiring. Then there is the peculiar dynamics of this place, always changing, usually not for the better, and at times dangerously so.
I can recommend working abroad just for the fact it has given me some of the most fulfilling work, enriching encounters and intense experiences that I have ever had. Weathers a lot better too.

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Hamish Osborn Bolivia

I was working as a technician for Welsh Water when I first saw the advert for an IS development worker to work in soil and water management in Bolivia. Having recently undertaken an M.Sc. in Natural Resource Management with a view to working overseas I knew immediately that this was the job I wanted. After a two-day selection meeting I could hardly believe it when I was offered a post with ACLO, a well established NGO based in the semi arid valleys in the South of the country.

I arrived in the country with a head full of ideas and techniques that I thought I could share with the local communities. However my first few visits to the ‘campo’ made me realise that things were not quite so simple and that technical solutions were only part of the answer to the complex and diverse range of problems I had seen.

Together with the ACLO field teams I set about getting to know the local farmers and their families. Our aim was to build up a picture of their needs and priorities in terms of soil and water management. We held workshops, attended meetings and organised training and exchange visits between different communities.

One of the biggest challenges in Bolivia is getting from A to B. I spent hours in the backs of pick ups and lorries on unbelievably rough roads which snaked up mountain passes with precipitous drops and forded fast flowing rivers. When the road ran out we walked. Keeping up with a Bolivian farmer at 14,000 feet above sea level on a 10 mile circuit to visit the local water sources left me somewhat breathless at times. But at the end of every journey I would be welcomed into the farmers’ homes with generous hospitality - a privilege that very few jobs can match.

An important but often overlooked aspect of working overseas is the impact that returned Development Workers can have in influencing attitudes here in Britain. I often find myself explaining the realities of the some aspect of life in ‘the South’ or helping friends and colleagues to see things from another point of view.

I often reflect on whether I gained more than I contributed in Bolivia. I returned home at the end of my time with a broader perspective on life and a whole host of precious memories. People often ask how working as a Development Worker has affected my career prospects back in the UK. I firmly believe that it has had a beneficial effect, when applying for jobs I am able to point out that whilst working overseas I developed a wide range of invaluable and transferable skills. I’d recommend it to anyone.

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I am currently working alternate weeks in the Municipality of Comarapa in the Department of Agriculture, Livestock and Forestry and in an NGO called Asistencia Social y Ecología (ASEC).

In the Municipality, there is only one motorbike to share with the other departments, so getting transport to the communities is often difficult. The highs are often felt on a visit to the campo and feeling the great appreciation that the agriculturalists have for our work. It was also a great moment when I scored the winning penalty to put the women's footie team 'Municipal' in 3rd position in the tournament, and we all received a bronze medal.

In ASEC I have helped with my forestry skills and knowledge in technical talks and workshops in the communities. I have also helped out in the office transferring computer skills, searching the internet and writing a web page for ASEC to assist in the search for funds http://www.asistenciasocialyecologia.0catch.com/. In the Municipality it has taken longer to orientate myself but we have achieved good planning for the next 6 months. I have given several workshops on the importance and benefits of tree species and how and where to plant them, in everal reforestation projects in which the Municipality provides tree seedlings to the communities. I have also been advising on projects such as windbreaks around the football pitch and sewage system, and in the project planning for the tree nursery in Comarapa.

Bolivian's are hard workers and put a lot of effort into our projects. It is satisfying to see that they are pleased with their achievements and are benefiting from the results.

Comarapa has been an easy town to adjust to, it is very friendly, relatively small and after the first few months I knew many people in the town. The communities are always delighted by our visits and always share their food with us even though they have very little. The climate here is known as 'temperate', and is rather like a very windy Mediterranean climate, so I have found it easy to adjust to the Comarapeñan way of life.

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