My name is Sandra, I am 19 years old and was born and raised in a small town in the Black Forest in Germany. I was an exchange student in Brazil for ten months back in 2013/14 (you can read all about that here).
At the moment I'm doing a voluntary service at a human rights organization in Oaxaca de Juárez, the capital of the Mexican state Oaxaca in the south-west of the country.
My departure was on the 17th of August 2017 and I'm going to stay here for exactly one year.
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| 9.679,70 km away from home |
So what made me leave Germany and my home again for such a long span of time?
Some people guess I just don't like my home country or the village I'm coming from but that's not really it. Yeah, I don't like living in a small village where nothing is happening and I dream about living in a big city later in my life. However I could just move someplace in Germany if that was the reason. Also, I love my family and leaving them is always difficult, so no that to my motivation as well.
When I came back from Brazil in 2014, I told everyone that I wanted to improve my marks at school (not that they were bad beforehand), so that I could study International Relations in Dresden after graduation. I was so sure of my plan of going to university directly after my A-levels back then.
About 1.5 years later my wishes started to change. I began to have the desire to go abroad again, especially for longer than just a few weeks to travel (my initial plan included visiting Brazil after graduation for a month or so).
At first I didn't do anything about it because I thought that no, I had already been abroad, I should really study before making any new plans of going away again. However it was still my dream and at some point I just couldn't resist the urge to inform myself about the options after graduating from high school. I realized quickly that a voluntary service would be the most suiting possibility because I like to stay in one place, build a life there and really get to know the place, people and culture there, like I already did in Brazil. Of course I want to travel to different places in my host country but work and travel just isn't made for me. There's also the option to do an au-pair year which fulfils my mentioned requirements but even though I did a internship at the nursery school my mum works at once, I don't like children enough for taking care of them for months. So yeah, doing a voluntary service just was my preference.
As I had already done my exchange year with AFS, I applied there first. I wanted to work at one of their offices in another country (if I remember correctly I chose Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Norway, Panama and one other I can't recall at the moment as my top five). I got accepted for the program but the only offices I would have had the option of going to where in Russia and Bulgaria (not quite sure about that, but it was a country in Eastern Europe). The alternative was doing "normal" voluntary service in Bolivia, but the chances were high that I would have been working in social project which I really didn't want to.
In the end I decided to decline the offer even though I would have loved going to Bolivia and it also has the advantage of being close to Brazil, the country I miss a lot. However as you only get notice about the project you'll be working at shortly before your departure with AFS, I didn't want to risk being unhappy with it for a year.
Fortunately the Welthaus (World House) Bielefeld had a second application phase and luckily I was invited to the selection day (first for Peru, but because of the available projects I asked for Mexico) and was accepted into their "weltwärts" program.
We had our first preparatory seminar in April directly after my last written A-level exam. The main topic was assignment of the volunteers to the different projects. My preference was an organization that dealt with human rights and was mostly office work and I was lucky to be assigned to a human rights organization in the capital of Oaxaca. I had my first skype conversation with one of their members on one night of the seminar but the connection wasn't that good so it wasn't a long call.
After that I exchanged some e-mails with the volunteer that worked here before me and of course I read quite a bit about the human rights situation in Oaxaca and Mexico in general as well as the organization's work to prepare myself.
We also had another preparatory seminar in June and it was also nice to meet the other volunteers again. We dealt mostly with country specific topics but there were also other seminar for example about humans rights and criticism on the "weltwärts" program and development policy.
So I hope I mentioned all the important things about my the background story of my voluntary service. I'm going to talk about the time before my departure and my first days here in Mexico in the upcoming post, so stay tuned.
Also, if you think you really haven't gotten an answer to the question in title of the post, here it is: I got overwhelmed by my wanderlust. That's just it. Most former exchange students would probably confirm that if you left once, you'll want to leave again and again because it's just impossible to get to know new places. I once read a post on Facebook where a mum told here daughter that she never left the plane that once brought here to her exchange year in Paraguay and I think the same applies for me. I've never left the plane that brought me to Brazil and luckily it can bring me to different places but I'm not sure if can ever leave it for good
¡Hasta luego!
Sandra
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