Tricky situations for volunteers with no easy answers

Meaningful Volunteer is about to roll out a system where we present future volunteers with a series of difficult situations that they might come across during their placement.

There are no easy answers to these questions.  They are all based on situations that actual volunteers have been in.

The questions are designed to get the volunteer thinking about the situations before they arrive. There are no wrong answers.

The questions are shown below.  What would you do?

• An elderly man comes up to you. He is obviously sick. He claims to have AIDS and will die without your help.
  
  What do you do? 

• A local in the village is starting to show a romantic interest in you. They are about your age and seem quite serious.
  
  What do you do? 

• A local man has four wives (not uncommon in Uganda) and upwards of twenty children. He says he cannot afford to send his children to school and wants you to help him.
  
  What do you do?

• A young girl in an English class is having difficulty forming words and is often absent in class. Further investigation shows that she has a serious infection in both ears and her tongue appears to be stuck to the bottom of her mouth.
  
  What do you do? 

• It is the end-of-year exams time in your placement area.  Teachers are split up and assigned to different schools to prevent cheating.  Some teachers are not required to supervise and just remain at their own school.
  
  You learn that one of the teachers is texting the answers to her colleagues.  The colleague is intercepting students as they take bathroom breaks.  They call them aside and quickly scribble the answers on the student's arm.  They are not being at all secretive about it.
  
  What do you do? 

Micro-Volunteering. Good or bad?

"Mirco-volunteering, just like normal volunteering, only one-eight the size." Number Two (kinda).

I usually cringe when I hear the phrase "Micro-Volunteering".

It brings to mind images of people clicking on a Facebook like-button for something like Save Darfur expecting that they've actually done something useful for Darfur.  Perhaps they've raised awareness of what's happening in Darfur by just a smidgen as people read their Facebook feed, but that is about it.

Then I saw this video by Ben Rigby at a TED talk.




Very interesting.  If this is what micro-volunteering is, then I like it.  Perhaps we should rename Facebook like-button-activism as nano-volunteering?  Maybe even yocto-volunteering?

We can't all head off to "deepest darkest Africa" and try to work with the less fortunate.  We can all volunteer in small ways though and work together to make this world a better place