MoldovAnn

This week was the UN Youth Summit 2006, with the theme “Development of Volunteerism and Social Partnership in Ukraine”. UNVs participated in several events throughout the four-day summit, which brought 150 high school and university students from all over Ukraine to a conference center just outside Kyiv.

I participated in the plenary session “Development of Volunteerism in Ukraine”, which was part of the opening events, which were held on December 5, International Volunteer Day. Seven of us UNVs participated in the plenary session, and three of us were asked to make presentations – Mietek, Igor and me. I get extremely nervous when making presentations in Russian, but not long ago I made an early New Year’s resolution to work on overcoming my apprehension, so I reluctantly agreed to prepare a short speech.

When we arrived at the venue, Anna (our UNV Country Office program assistant, who had organized our participation in the summit) said some of the local media would like to interview a couple of UNVs. I HATE media interviews, I get even more nervous than I do during public presentations, and you put that camera in front of me and I get so afraid of saying something stupid and/or wrong. I tried to “disappear”, but Anna hunted me down and said she wanted me to do an interview. First, the reporter talked to Igor for about 5 minutes. Then she turned to me. I tried to convince her to interview Mietek, who is a natural public speaker and who comes alive with a microphone in front of him. “No,” she smiled at me. “We interviewed a man already, so it would be nice to interview a woman.” I couldn’t get out of it. I didn’t die, but I sure did want to. I understood almost everything that she said to me, with only one quick sideways glance to Anna for clarification of a word. I rambled a bit, and must have said something comprehensible as they got enough material for a quick clip on the evening news. It was weird to see and hear myself on TV – what an accent I have! The next day, I joked with my colleagues that I sound so great in my own head – no accent, everything perfectly conjugated, and sentences beautifully constructed. What happens between my brain and my mouth?

I called Anya in Tvarditsa that evening because the TV interview that day reminded me of the last TV interview I did in Russian – after our Swearing-In Ceremony in November 2004. I could hardly remember how to say my own name then, I was so nervous! Anya and I had a good laugh, remembering that day. We chatted a bit longer, and I was glad to hear that everyone is doing well in Tvarditsa. They have a new Peace Corps Volunteer living with them, and it sounds like they are getting along well.

I participated in a round table about volunteerism on the final day of the conference with Anna and a couple other volunteer “activists.” The discussion started very slowly, but bit by bit, more people trickled into our room and the conversation got livelier and livelier. I was asked to compare and contrast volunteerism in the U.S. and Ukraine, which I thought was a pretty big topic to tackle. I always find it difficult to talk in such generalizations – “volunteerism in American is…, and in Ukraine it is….” – so I used instead an example from a conversation we’d had in the car on the way to the conference center. Anna had told me that her sister had offered to help (to volunteer with) the conference planning committee. The organizers said Yes! They would love to have a volunteer to help with the preparations. When the young woman arrived at their office, the staff was totally unprepared for her, had no work identified for her to do, and spent about an hour discussing and debating what exactly they could give her to do. In the end, they asked her to make a few phone calls. She left that afternoon disappointed, discouraged, and definitely not planning to return. Anna felt this was an example of the Ukrainian “management” style of not wanting to actually delegate anything to anyone else. There is a mentality, she said, that it is easier to do it yourself than to explain it to someone else. Personally, I think there is also a distrust of others, and a fear that a subordinate might actually do something better than you. There is also a widespread inability to plan and prepare in advance. For our discussion, I suggested that an organization should consider their volunteers as they would any other staff, meaning you should recruit, interview, manage and reward volunteers, just as you would for any other staff position. True, your volunteers don’t get a salary, but this led to a good discussion of how you can reward your volunteers (free internet usage at the office, participation in seminars and conferences, tea and cookies, certificates, and other ideas).

The conversation went off on a variety of tangents, some controversial and all very interesting. In the end, no one wanted to end the discussion and the conference organizers were begging us to stop talking so the next session could begin! I wrapped up with an analogy – the volunteerism movement in Ukraine is like our round table, starting slowly, with a few people, but becoming energetic and fun and hard to stop!