Beatrice is 21 years old today, and she attends the second year of psychology in Milan. She loves this university and is particularly interested in developmental psychology because she thinks that the environment in which kids are educated, and in which they grow up is fundamental to understand the pattern of their behaviour in the future. In the past, she has studied languages, and ancient cultures at Liceo Classico, motivated by her interest in different traditions and their roots.

It is for these reasons – namely child development and foreign cultures – that she decided to volunteer in Africa for her 18^th birthday. She spent a whole month in Jambiani, a small village on Zanzibar Island, teaching English and Italian to people of different age groups, through Wep. Her classes were of 30 students each; she spent the morning teaching English to a group of 3 and 6 years old, and the afternoon teaching Italian to adults.

At first: “I was afraid not to be ready to do what I was asked to”, especially when she found out that she would have had to teach languages all by herself. As a matter of fact, the children she would teach only spoke Swahili, so she feared that the language barrier would have been hard to manage. On the other hand, teaching to adults made her nervous: would they judge her because of her younger age? Would they understand she was no better than they were just because she was there to teach them something? However, “All the opposite happened,” she says smiling. “I created good relations with the kids”, and “Even if we spoke different languages, there are things that go beyond this”. She still smiles thinking about how thankful these people seemed to her for the time she was spending with them: “I felt useful, I was there to teach them languages, but they were teaching me even more. I could not believe to be so happy about something that felt so effortless, natural to me: I can say it was a pleasure. They were thankful for the time I was spending with them, and it was clear to me that I was spending it in a very desirable way for both them and me. They were thankful and I was as happy as I had rarely been before”.

OTHER EXPERIENCES

Those days made Beatrice willing to keep on volunteering. Therefore, once home, she started to look for some projects in her local area, in fact, she knew she would have not been able to go abroad all the time, continuing with school and university at home. She joined the Red Cross, because of her interest in health, and volunteered with them for two years, until COVID-19 started to make things more difficult. Her favourite activity, the one she did the most, was spending her afternoon with kids in the pediatrics department of her town’s hospital. Even there: “Their gratefulness and smiles were worth all the time I spent studying at night to make up for those afternoons.” She also spent some time with some of the local planners to design inclusion projects addressed to refugees and migrants in her town. However, due to the current pandemic, these activities had to stop for a while. “Initially I felt like giving up, and I did for a while. I thought that there was no way to continue with these activities with the rules of social distancing and all”, she told me. However, thanks to the people she had met during the volunteering projects that she realized COVID-19 was not making it impossible to do it. In fact, her friends at the Red Cross asked of her, pushing her to start again with new projects designed to fit the new social distancing-rules. As a matter of fact, she has recently started to volunteer with them at “Telefono Gentile” this is a project though for the elderly and lonely people, to keep them company in this moment of isolation through phone calls during the afternoon.

A NEW WAY TO VOLUNTEER

Moreover, thanks to one of the volunteers she had gone to Africa with, she has started at the beginning of this academic year to volunteer with an association that teaches Italian to refugees. Of course, the classes are online, so she has not had the chance to spend time with these migrants in person, but even in this case “Their happiness surprises me every time, and if you think about it, what I do is so simple for me! I am just helping them to know what to say when buying meat at the supermarket!” From her words, it is clear, therefore, that the pandemic has not been an obstacle to these volunteering activities. “Surely the methods of volunteering have changed, but the feelings and the reasons to do it, at least for me, stay the same” and this is what matters the most when volunteering. From what Beatrice tells us, in fact, volunteering is always worthwhile, no matter what are the conditions or the people you do it for. It is not something you do for others only, but for yourself as well. Surely, the pandemics have closed many doors in this field, but, on the other hand, many others opened. For example, “Telefono Gentile” is a project that started for COVID-19, but makes feel loved many people that used to be lonely even before it.

So, despite a moment of discouragement at the beginning of the pandemic, Beatrice has understood that even though the situation in which you volunteer might not be the one you were dreaming of, it is not “less important”, “less meaningful”. In fact, as she states: “It is still possible to do something, and how I feel is still real, motivating and life-changing for me”.