Partners in Development: A Message from Global Volunteers' CEO Bud Philbrook

Global Volunteers facilitates human and economic development at the community level and engages volunteers to do much of the work. But as is stated in Global Volunteers "Philosophy of Service -- Strategy for Development," only local people actually do development. An organization like Global Volunteers can help facilitate development and volunteers can help catalyze development, but only local people do it. With that said, facilitating and catalyzing are vital activities in the development process.

Development professionals have known for decades that merely providing financial resources, even in the form of education and medical supplies, is insufficient. USAID, the World Bank, and other government development agencies have spent literally billions of dollars over the past 50 years with varying degrees of success. More often than not, where only financial or other material resources have been offered, little or no development improvements can be measured. The most successful efforts have been at the local community level where local leaders are in charge and outsiders provide appropriate catalytic assistance. That is what Global Volunteers strives to do. We offer volunteers to work under the direction of local leaders on community-based projects that the community determines are important to its long-term human and economic development.


How can anyone, therefore, individually make a significant difference in three weeks? Most people can't. However, Global Volunteers sends multiple teams of volunteers to each community every year, year after year. Every volunteer becomes a vital link in a long chain of volunteers. For the local children, each volunteer makes a world of difference because without all the volunteers who came before and after, their lives would be very different. We know this is the case because we've been working in some communities for more than 25 years and adults with whom we taught 10 or 15 years ago tell us that this case.

Some say "Passing along knowledge and training would make a better mission for Global Volunteers than just stepping into the places of community members." I could not agree more, and that is always our objective. However, human development is a generational process -- it takes a very long time. That is why we focus on children. It is our experience that children we teach will learn things they otherwise would not and be motivated to do constructive things with their life that they otherwise might not have even imagined. That in fact, is the principal way in which we facilitate development.

Others suggest it might be better to provide financial resources rather than volunteers so the local people could be paid to do local construction work. We would agree provided the only objectives are to construct or repair a building and increase local income. But Global Volunteers is about waging peace and promoting justice. We attempt to achieve this goal by working hand-in-hand with local people on community development projects that community leaders deem important. Our objective is to create an environment where local people and volunteers work together on a common project such that in the process of working together they become friends. Friendship is very important to what we do because friendship is foundational to peace and justice in our world. When there is a dispute among friends, friends will generally resolve their dispute nonviolently.

When people have a friend against whom an injustice is being perpetrated, they generally want to do something to right the injustice. Consequently, the more friends there are in the world, the more nonviolent dispute resolution there will be. The more friends there are the world, the more people there will be working for justice. For Global Volunteers, the work project is the vehicle to establish friendships. In addition, we do provide financial resources so that local laborers are paid.

Sean Penn recently said about his work in Haiti, "The first person served by service is the server." We agree fully.

Red Dirt

Red dirt – that has been our home for the past three weeks. We have walked countless miles around the village and on that red dirt we practiced our Kihehe and Kiswahili terms.

On that red dirt we saw the smiling faces of mothers, fathers, grandfathers, grandmothers, and the crying faces of babies who couldn’t handle the paleness of our skin.

On the red dirt we came together with locals through playing soccer, reconstructing/building a house, fetching water, spreading grass seed, hiking to waterfalls, and dancing while watching stars.

The same red dirt has come into our house and around the table where we shared countless hours of laughter, insightful conversation, cultural learning, candlelit eating, and competitive card playing. Here, we became family.

That same red dirt was carried upstairs where we spent each night writing in journals, reading or discussing the future, boys and bodily functions. Each night like a small girl’s sleepover with rolling laughter as new inside jokes were created.

As we leave the red dirt, I know that each of us will take part of it with us wherever we go. The world will look different as we have seen a new culture and way of life. Forever we will reflect on the endless memories we’ve created.

-Kayli, Tanzania Volunteer, January 2010

It's a Small World...of Volunteering

Now as I'm on my way with Global Volunteers to serve on a team in the Cook Islands, I remember when I was first inspired by Global Volunteers with a 2004 newspaper photo featuring a local woman, Kristina Flanagan, in Romania with twin babies sitting on her lap and her lovely story. It was definately something I wanted to do one day. I kept that story in my mind, and when I retired in 2008 I took the opportunity to go to Romania. I'm not related to Kristina (although we share the same last name) and I never met her, but I did communicate briefly with her by e-mail shortly before I left for Romania on my first Global Volunteers service program. While serving in Barlad, I also communicated by e-mail with Kristina's daughter who served with her mother in Romania when she was age 16. She shared some of her exciting experiences with me regarding her team and her work at Tutova clinic taking care of babies and toddlers.

I spent the majority of my time at the clinic in the infant room. There were seven babies (six girls and one boy) and the average age was seven months. Celine was forever smiling in spite of her congenital hip defect and our "little gymnast" Alina, who was very active, had Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.

Our team of sixteen volunteers really bonded and we traveled together on the weekends to Transylvania to see Dracula's Castle and to Moldova to visit the painted monasteries. The time I spent in Romania was one of the best experiences of my life!

Last year, I had the great pleasure of serving at Caritas in Poland, and now I'm on my way to Rarotonga in the Cook Islands! I look forward to spending time with the elders at their day program, working with adults who are developmentally disabled or tutoring children in reading and writing. Please follow my blog entries beginning in Mid-March at: http://cookislandsteamjournal.blogspot.com/

- Grateful Global Volunteer Ellen Flanagan

Mother and Son Serve in Romania

Delta Wichner Nuthak learned about Global Volunteers' Romania service program online, but it was her excited phone call that convinced her son Trevor to join her on the humanitarian journey. “It took me about two seconds to decide, I just couldn’t say no,” Trevor said.

Within months, mother and son travelled to Tutova to help care for underweight, disabled and abandoned babies at a Pediatric Recovery Clinic in Tutova Hospital near Barlad in east-central Romania. To nurture the infants' natural growth, Trevor and Delta played with and fed them -- basically offering love to every child in the clinic, they said.

Delta explained that the clinic is not an adoption agency, but rather a place for the children who have medical conditions and whose family can't afford to care for them. “In Romania, there are no outside adoptions. That means, in order to adopt a child in Romania, you have to be Romanian. You can’t be from another country,” she said. Many of the children in the clinic are orphans, but a small number of the children in the clinic have parents, but they are too poor to afford medical care for their child. Throughout their three weeks, Delta and Trevor became attached to each child, but they still formed favorites. “Sammy was probably my favorite. He was definitely a hair-grabber,” laughed Trevor, who also taught English language skills at the area high school.

Read more here about Trevor and Delta's Romanian Journey of the Heart. Learn more about Global Volunteers' Romania Service Program here.