I volunteered to join the

I volunteered to join the development instructor programme in 2000.  I viewed it as a great opportunity to put something back and gain invaluable life experience prior to embarking on a degree.   I attended a meeting, which are ran regularly throughout the UK and paid the 2,000 ().  However when I arrived in Denmark at the school I found that this amount was just half of the school fees needed and that the rest had to be fundraised in the streets of Denmark.  I found this daunting as all volunteers had to ask for strangers to support, what was worse, on reflection was that half of all the time spent in Denmark at the so called education stage was spent trying to reach the target of 2K.  Logically this leads me to conclude the training could be completed in 3 months rather than six if the fundraising element was eradicated. 

After much deliberation the I along with other volunteers hit the streets of Denmark, during this time while collecting some Danish would ask are you part of Tvind I had no idea what this meant or what the were referring to.  However it would soon become clear.  Volunteers were taken to events held by the travelling folk high schools in order to meet others, on of which was held at Tvind. 

I decided not to collect on the streets and following rather long discussions about the motivations of the organisations I began to question the whole set up.  The so-called training programme I had enrolled for was not educational in the slightest.  In the morning the head teacher who is a member of the Teachers organisation would pay her guitar and the education was done via online training courses, which are utterly useless, everything was badly organised and morale was very low.  Looking back on reflection their selection process for the programme is extremely poor.  As one would logically expect to place people in remote regions should not be taken lightly and some of the volunteers had pasts that lead me to believe they simply had nothing else to do, one individual on the course had mental illness and had to be sent home, another was deemed unfit as he too, had some kind of mental illness.  Furthermore for others the stresses of fundraising were undertaken on a group basis, this lead to a lot of peer pressure, if the targets were low the so called teachers had no support and instead cleverly I guess left the group pressure dynamics to set in and as a result others left.  This was a horrible experience to put people through as they had signed up to do something productive, put their lives on hold and left their countries behind.  Logically volunteers wanted to see the process through To go home and explain what an absolute joke the whole process was hard when some had committed to the programme.  The treatment of volunteers in the deliberated schools in Denmark is something I still find hard to explain.

The set up is easily undermined, and given the organisations set up, I should never have had faith with the organisation to got to Africa.  I worked in Africa and found that the projects I worked on, employees were volunteers in Africa on the HIV and Aids campaigns; they work on a daily basis in the hope of employment.  Those that do get employment, do so on the basis they join the teachers group which involves salaries being put into a TG common fund rather like Marxist policies they sacrificed their personal lives, money etc to be involved in an organisation they have no control over.  As a result you recognise the managers of these projects are a clog in the wheel of some larger organisation that they have no control over.  Similarly once engulfed, how can they leave?  Many have little or no qualifications in whatever country they are from originally and how do they explain they have been involved in an organisation which operates the way the TG do???

Similarly the project co-ordinator was from the USA and had previously failed to get a degree in medicine, she joined as a volunteer and eventually joined the teachers group.  Once again her organisational abilities left a lot to be desired and it was obvious outside the organisation her abilities in a conventional role would be limited, furthermore a van was given as a gift to the project to do outreach in rural areas which was in fact used for her personal use. The whole project was run badly, a so-called charity ran by so-called project managers with little or NO qualifications at all.  I doubted this is what I signed up to see on a gap year, I wanted to see development work, instead corruption, deceit and bad management was observed.  If you are considering this programme go to VSO!!!  I left Africa early, disgusted with the organisation. 

Name witheld

UK