An aspect of intercultural learning which we haven’t looked at much so far in the Absolutely Intercultural podcast is experiences gained through voluntary work. In Barcelona at the Anna Lindh Foundation forum, I was fortunate enough to meet Rachad Izzat from Morocco who has gained a huge amount of intercultural experience through his involvement in short, medium and long term volunteer placements. It hadn’t occurred to me before that this is a great way of finding about new places and really becoming integrated into the host community especially when the accommodation is with host families. Rachad has worked in Italy, Denmark and Norway and I was curious to find out about his Norwegian stay. I was also delighted to discover that he had learned some Norwegian and we were able to speak in Danish and Norwegian for a short while (the two languages are very similar and almost mutually intelligible). One unexpected aspect was that Rachad said that volunteering in all these different places has made him more aware of his Moroccan culture and more proud and protective of it.
Now Rachad works for Chantiers Sociaux Marocain which is a national volunteering organisation in Morocco where Rachad helps in their aim of offering volunteering opportunities to both young Moroccans and foreigners.
There was also a volunteering aspect to the second person featured in this show which was Cornelis Hulsman, a Dutchman now living in Egypt with his Egyptian wife where he is greatly concerned with improving the quality of media reporting in the country. Over the years he has built a series of organisations which seek to build up information databases so that reporters can set their stories into context and lexical databases to help translating articles to and from Arabic and a great deal of this work is dependent on volunteer labour, some of it Egyptian and some of it foreign. Some of the foreign volunteers don’t even need to be in Egypt to help when they support the IT work. But Hulsman told of some great work done by pairing up Egyptians and foreigners whose task is to build up background information about given topics. The partnership between foreign and native students ensures new perspectives on both sides.
I hadn’t set out to make a volunteer themed show but that is how it turned out in the end and I was very pleased to meet these two people who are really helping to make a difference in their communities.