Ways In Which Volunteering Is Like “Lost”

No Comments | July 2nd, 2007 | Trackback

First of all, you may well find yourself in a strange and mysterious but beautiful place, needing to figure out how to work with strangers from all different walks of life and eating mainly fruit. Hopefully you will not find that a surprisingly large number of those strangers have killed someone or been involved in crime some other way.

All kidding aside, I will start by admitting I only recently got hooked on Lost (and was sadly only able to see the first two seasons) and I have already compared it to my job, teaching English. I don’t mean to make a joke out of teaching or volunteering…or Lost: I do actually think there is a good amount of wisdom to be found in this series. Such as:

Everyone has a story – you just might not be privy to it. In the course of volunteering abroad, you really are likely to meet all sorts of people…and you never really know the whole story. Volunteering to teach a class, I taught a girl who had been exchanged as a prisoner during a war; one woman – in another organization – had quit her job in a multi-national company to join an organization taking a stance against that corporation. I knew these things because the people told me – but if they hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been the wiser. I’ve learned not to assume I necessarily know where someone is coming from.

Sometimes you have to choose between making the best of what you’ve got (building nice things on the island and hoping to be rescued) and bailing as fast as you can (taking matters into your own hands and building a boat). Choosing one means investing your time, energy and resources in that one and not the other.

This could apply to any number of situations in life, but in the context of volunteering, it could illustrate the choice many organizations face: they have to choose one route or strategy – and by default reject another - when they don’t really know if it is the best one or not.

Pushing the button – people do this religiously without really knowing why. In Lost, you’ll recall, it kind of seemed like they should keep on pushing that button every hour…and so they did. I know, I know, they were right, things blew up and killed a few people when they did an experiment and stopped…but I think there are a lot of things in life which are similar to this: people keep addressing problems in the same way, because it seems like they should, even if they don’t really have a clear reason as to why that’s the thing to do. Maybe someone daydreams about packing it all in and joining the Peace Corps…but they keep working their regular job because it just seems like they should.

To be continued…when I get ahold of Season 3…