Tom Lowe - Intervol volunteer 2014
Tom is a student from Lancaster University, who was a part of the Action Sitaru project 2014. He was based in the community of Buwandyambi in a group made up of volunteers from Nottingham University as well as Lancaster. Both Lancaster and Nottingham Universities work with the volunteer organisation Intervol, who recruit students for our projects. We talked to Tom about his time in Uganda; what he had hoped to gain from the experience and the challenges he faced along the way.
Tom first read about Intervol on his student union's website, and the short description about sending volunteers to Uganda already had him hooked! He then met the Intervol representatives at his university's freshers fair and this meeting convinced him that he wanted to get involved. He had already thought about spending the summer abroad volunteering, and felt that Little BIG Africa's project stood out in terms of sustainability and making a real difference in the heart of the community. 'Voluntourism is a phrase that's thrown about a lot (sometimes wrongly) but I felt that that was what these other projects were offering whereas LBA appeared to offer that little bit more in terms of impacting the lives of the community, yet at the same time balancing the travelling aspect of the trip'.
Tom went into the project hoping to see the change within the community as a result of the work done by his group. Having only previously travelled to Western countries, he looked forward to experiencing a completely different culture from his own. He hoped to learn more about Ugandan culture and develop his own understanding of how people in this type of situation live. 'I came to Uganda with some idea of what living in the village would be like and how desperately poor some people are through the media, but of course that's always going to be a somewhat tinted perspective. It's been great being able to view things from a different perspective, a real perspective.' His time in Buwandyambi gave him a first hand experience of the true reality of rural Ugandan living.
The experience came with challenges alongside the benefits, as Tom and his group found the Ugandan attitudes towards time and commitment to be large culture shocks. In Uganda, people do not stick to schedule as strictly as in the UK, often because of the inflexibility of issues that arise in daily life, such as burials and the temperamental weather, which makes trying to get things done frustrating. His group found that people would often confirm that they would be at a meeting and yet not turn up. However, 'after we accepted that everything runs at a much slower pace out here, as a group we managed to be much more productive.' The group worked around these obstacles, such as adapting their adult education meetings to impromptu house visits so that they could reach their audience.
As well as opening volunteers' eyes up to new experiences, the programme has the potential to open up career opportunities, as the wealth of skills gained through the different challenges that volunteers face during placement are sought after by employers. Tom studies Economics, which included some focus on Politics in his first year, and has considered working in Health and Development Economics. He feels that 'having first hand experience of being in a developing country, working with the people there, will definitely be beneficial'.
