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How Do You Volunteer Professional Services?
keefus_a writes "My wife and I usually take a week long vacation in the Spring and I tossed out the idea of volunteering abroad. Neither of us has a problem with doing manual labor, or whatever task is needed. However, I thought it might be of some value, and substantially more rewarding than our daily grind, if we could volunteer our professional services (I'm a network guy and my wife has a master's degree in counseling). The problem is that I haven't found any resources for doing so on a short-term basis. So I ask Slashdot. Has anyone ever done short-term volunteer work in your professional field? What organization did you contact? Or are we better off donating money to a particular cause and just working on a tan?"
I worked in Peru and Bolivia in 2001, and I say just go somewhere, most captials in 3rd world countries have multiple NGO offices, go there and ask. Network is hard since you will most likely work for a telecom company instead, but local universities could of course be glad to get help.
I like the one suggestion above, to just go and ask. Few organizations are as mired in bureaucracy as the head offices of NGOs. It's the field offices that may be able to come up with some work on the spot.
Short of that, get a tan. Sorry, but there's no such thing as "intellectual day labour" - most jobs that use education require you to mesh in with a team, with an office environment, with a set of clients and problems. It takes a week, minimum, often a month, to be productive enough to pay back the hours spent showing you around, introducing you, briefing you.
If you want a great story about the fun of dealing with NGOs, try this 3-screen Atlantic article on the lady who had the terrific idea of a co-op of Afghan farmers that would produce essential oil from their pomegranates for use by "The Body Shop" and others for high-end soaps. It involved purchasing, at first, a single hand-cranked seed-oil press.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200712/afghans
My favourite bit on page 2 - asked to fill in a 14-screen spreadsheet with numbers on "production coefficients", the "equipment procurement, loan-repayment summaries, sales figures, labor costs, packaging and shipping costs, and cash-flow statements. It took me two weeks, full-time, just to fill in the cells with real numbers. And I have a master's degree from a U.S. university. I began to wonder how Afghan entrepreneurs would ever be able to negotiate such requirements." Presenting it to them at the end of the two weeks, she's told, the "...agribusiness team greeted the spreadsheet with a snort. "We don't need anything like that. He just loves to cook up these spreadsheets," they remarked of their colleague."
You're going to find bias anywhere you try to volunteer, church or otherwise. I'd advise not to volunteer at a Christian church that showed bias, as the preacher is likely a wolf in sheep's clothing (Pat Robertson has converted more Christians to athiesm than all the athiests at slashdot).
Take homosexuality, for instance. How many clean shaven preachers preach against homosexuality, when the Bible says not to make yourself look like a woman and facial hair is a secondary sexual characteristic? Pat Robertson is guilty of this sin. The truth is, God loves homosexuals as much as he loves anyone. None of us are perfect, and all are forgiven. A judgemental person is NOT a good Christian and any judgemental preacher is not one you should follow, or work for.
Free Martian Whores!
As a woman who can remember the dark days before Roe when pregnant girls "disappeared" out of schools and thousands of desperate women died every year from backalley and coathanger abortions, I know I have to do my part to help abortion rights. Since I'm not a medical professional and can't perform free abortion services myself, I do the next best thing and donate my time at local Planned Parenthood and private abortion clinics. The doctors, nurses and staff are all wonderful, welcoming people, but most of them know next to nothing about computers because the average abortionist is over 60 years old. Increased reporting requirements, insurance mandates, and electronic records means that computers are more important than ever and small abortion clinics have trouble even keeping their computers and networks running and can't afford expensive consultants and medical software.
All this means that you wouldn't believe the smiles on the faces of abortion clinics staffs when I volunteer at their offices. My latest deal is saving them money on software by installing open source wherever I can. I live in a mid-sized mid-western city, and recently redid a local Planned Parenthood network. I replaced their hokey Netgear router with an old Pentium II beige box running OpenBSD 3.3 as a firewall (BEST release of ANY OS for a firewall, IMHO), and I even reinstalled the secretary's Windows 98 PC with Ubuntu 9.04 and OpenOffice and told her it was Windows Vista. (HA!)
So if you want to put your skills to work for the greater good, call your local abortion clinic and tell them you can help with their computers. You won't regret it.