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Foreword to How to Live Your Dream of Volunteering Overseas By Joseph Collins, Stefano Dezerega, Zahara Heckscher
wenty-six
years ago Joe Collins blew into our lives. My daughter, Anna,
was still in diapers; I was just pushing thirty. Barely thirty, too,
Joe had already lived and worked much of his life abroad; I was awestruck.
I figured if I hung around this man I'd learn a lot. How right I was.
Since then, Anna and I have been fortunate to have traveled and worked
in countries around the world, many described in these pages. Now Joe
and his insightful colleagues, Stefano DeZerega and Zahara Heckscher,
are teaching us both again, having created this unique tool, distilling
their collected eight decades of experience.
For Anna and me, their book is a powerful call to think about the meaning of choice and its consequences. “Volunteer” derives from the Latin voluntas, meaning “choice.” It suggests no coercion, no shoulds, no musts. Ordinarily, choice involves knowns, or it's not truly a choice—that is the assumption. Yet, the experience of volunteering abroad is, fundamentally, about the unknown. Why would one choose, freely, something that by its nature is so utterly unpredictable as volunteering to work overseas?
Maybe it is because we sense that the very act of entering the unknown will change us. We know that change is necessary for growth; but change is also frightening. Sometimes we simply have to put ourselves in new, unpredictable circumstances in order to change. We have to leap.
And leap we must. For we're pushing our planet nearer and nearer to the edge of hope, to the point at which realistic hope for planetary healing is almost nil—almost. To build honest hope in such an era requires more courage and insight than perhaps has ever been demanded of our species. So how do we prepare ourselves, and push ourselves, to take on these challenges, to push forward hope's edge?
In writing Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet, Anna and I were struck that virtually all of the individuals we chronicled experienced a moment of dissonance, a moment when their view of themselves and of their world got turned upside down. They saw with new eyes.
For the people we met, from landless peasants in Brazil to entrepreneurial crafts people in Bangladesh to village women in Kenya, this jarring moment—this dissonance—led to a cascade of choices that led them all to create changes in their lives and their communities.
I was changed by visiting such disparate cultures, by meeting people who had found the courage to listen to their hearts and create more life-serving communities. I see things differently now. I now know that the world we have created thus far is not the end of the line.
And for Anna too, such experiences were transformational. From Nicaragua to South Africa to India, she heard people expressing similar desires for co-operation and community. She saw ways that people on the grassroots level were creating a different type of economic development--creating markets that build stronger communities instead of turning them down. Through these encounters she returned with greater insight into how she can make change here, and with greater faith that change is possible.
Now we both see more clearly that indeed we are all fish for whom water does not exist until, of course, we leap (or are tossed) out of our element. We cannot see what is our own culture unless we leave it.
We, all of us, must be willing to jump out of the water. Only then can we see the larger “story” shaping our increasingly globalized culture. Only then can we choose—hopefully—that which is truer and more life-serving. Leaving the knowns of our own culture--through proactive action such as volunteering overseas--can give us the tools to be helpful at the level our planet now needs.
Throughout the evolution of cultures many diverse stories have told us what it means to be human. Today, though, one dominates. It is spreading around the world. It tells us that we humans are simply narrow materialists, ego-encapsulated consumers, ultimately driven by our selfishness to endlessly accumulate.
When we jump out of the water, we begin to see that this story is a shabby caricature of human nature. We begin to see the true richness that is human possibility. As we begin to create our own stories, we are no longer victims—simply products of stories created by others.
So maybe volunteering overseas is really about choice at the most profound level. Making a choice based not on knowing but on not knowing may set the stage for just the opening we need to break free of limiting ideas and assumptions. That can be true if we combine our choices with the discipline of self-awareness and ongoing reflection these perceptive authors call us to.
This is a book that forces us to ask ourselves the hard questions, ones we may never have thought to ask. And through such asking, and answering, we become part of that long—unfinished—conversation about what it means to be human, what it means to volunteer, what it means to choose.
So, read this book and get ready to choose, not from knowing what will unfold, but precisely because you cannot know.
Frances Moore Lappé and Anna Lappé
August 2001
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