5 Words That I Discovered the Meaning of When Volunteering
I’ve always loved looking up meanings of words. When I was a kid, whenever I came across a new word when reading I would immediately look it up in a dictionary and marvel at the definitions and classifiers prescribed to it by some invisible hand. However, during my volunteering experience in Peru I learned new meanings for five special words I had once assumed into my vocabulary without hesitation.
Contrast
I’m not the first western girl to go to a less developed country and be shocked by the poverty, lack of infrastructure and pollution I witnessed. However, I believe that it takes seeing it with your own eyes to believe in all the inequalities that exist in our world and understand them, two things that are crucial to be able to be empathetic towards people choosing to migrate in search of a better life.
Between the different barrios of Lima, you can find yourself on a street with tall, clean and modern but heavily guarded apartment buildings and the next street over standing between half built brick buildings, many lacking roofs or windows. The lack of infrastructure can clearly be seen in the constant traffic jams and the lack of paved roads especially on the outskirts of town and the pollution in the thick layer of smog covering the distant mountains. Contrast is a part of everyday life.
I was lucky enough (though I didn’t feel that way at the time) to have a host family who lived in a lower middle class neighbourhood, where I got to experience “normal” Peruvian life. If I had lived in one of the glossy skyscrapers in the middle of westernized Miraflores, I doubt I would have taken this lesson to heart.
Grateful
In line with the previous lesson I learned, volunteering in Peru taught me to be grateful for what I have. I come from a place of enormous privilege; Finland is a country with one of the best education systems in the world with universal health care and a rigid government safety net guaranteed for all citizens. It’s a country that is so safe that in an experiment 11 out of 12 wallets left out in the street were promptly returned to their owner.
Volunteering in Peru and talking with locals about the hardships and inequality they experience daily made me realize how much I had taken these things for granted and made me so much more grateful for what I have back home.

Exchange
Before I left to Peru I only spoke rudimentary Spanish, relying heavily on English and French to substitute my lacking Spanish vocabulary. However, despite the language barrier I could communicate my point across successfully most of the time.
During my volunteering experience, I learned the importance of exchange in communication. Exchange is giving and receiving; it’s exchanging with another person by actively listening, using body language to convey subtler feelings and giving yourself to another person without expectation of recompense. Not being able to rely on speaking my mother tongue gave me the chance to take a step back to listen and truly exchange with another person.

Diversity
One of the things that struck me the most in Peru was both the enormous amount of diversity inside the country. As a population, Peru’s is quite a melting pot for vastly different cultures: European, Chinese, Amerindian…I was struck at how each region of Peru has their own unique cultural heritage with their unique cuisine, music, traditional dances and vibrant festivities.
From desert sand dunes to the Amazon jungle to the mystical mountain regions Peru is also a country of biological and climatological diversity. Seeing the Ica desert, the Andean magnificence of Macchu Picchu and the Pacific coastline in Lima made me want to return to my country and explore its own diversity.


Connection
Despite all the differences between my country and Peru, I could feel at home in this alien environment. By connecting with locals, I learned the importance of focusing on our similarities over our differences instead of trying to categorize people.
We are more similar than we are different. We all have hopes and dreams, fears and prejudices, strengths and weaknesses. Why then does it seem that nowadays we are drifting further and further apart from each other?
Volunteering abroad taught me the value of making connections all over the world and uniting together to achieve a bigger purpose. Volunteering taught me that in order to really achieve the Sustainable Development Goals we truly do all have to connect, unite and work together to make our little world a better place for everyone.

