The diary of a volunteer: CEAR in Las Palmas

Ever since reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance I have been searching for Quality. Doing things with Quality means that you enter what you are doing, that you connect with it. For example, if you are faced with a problem don’t be scared of it but make it your friend. Sit down with it. If your motorcycle is not working the only way to solve this with Quality is to understand the machine and calmly work out what’s wrong with it. Connect with the machine.

Now, the sad truth is that the only thing with which I have booked considerable success using this philosophy is with my (by now) famous tortilla Española. I connect with that potato and egg based pancake and for this reason it always turns out well. However, I do precious little other things in life with Quality and this bothers me a bit. Nevertheless, this weekend my spirits were raised. I went on a two and a half day trip to Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, and witnessed that there are quite a few people who do things with Quality at the NGO I do volunteer work for: CEAR (Comisión Española de Ayuda al Refugiado). I will try to explain why and why this is important.

I do most of my CEAR work from home, late at night after work, often accompanied by Aqui Hay Tomate re-runs on the television. The work that I do does not involve too much connecting, although I try. Since I started my new job I don’t have time to swing by the CEAR office to chat with Mariví or Eugenia, the two colleagues I normally deal with. I have no time to connect (a gumption which is explained in the book, but which I will not go into for the moment, although it is a very interesting subject indeed). This is why I was happy to receive the invitation to go Las Palmas and participate in the 7th CEAR Volunteer Assembly. I was happy to actually feel I was part of an organization, to be a part of CEAR.

Multinational

So what have been the gains from my 58 hour hop-over to Gran Canaria? Well, several. First of all I discovered that there are many good people working for this organization. Good people from all over the world. I was surprised by how many foreigners attended, ranging from Cameroon to Germany to the United States to Sweden. All of them wanting to contribute to the greater good of the NGO. Many with the Quality I was talking about earlier.

Second of all, I had fun. I laughed a lot. This is very important.Another highlight was the workshop I attended on the reasons of being a volunteer as seen through the five senses. The truth is that I joined CEAR just because I thought it was a very good and important cause and this reasoning was unlikely to be changed in doing exercises involving my nose, eyes, ears, tongue and hands. The workshop started with a group massage where we – after stroking each others back for a couple of minutes – had to ‘throw away the negative energy we had just collected’. Normally I find this stuff rather ‘bla-bla’ but something told me this was going to be different. And it was. I did my best to connect with the exercises.

Eyes-Wide-Shut
The session was very open and the discussions interesting. At one stage I was blindfolded, laid down on the floor and left alone in the empty room. The idea was that I had to use only my ears for orientation and that I had to trust the team in whatever it was they were going to do with me. This was not so much of a problem. I was dead tired of a night without sleep so that soon I was half-way to dreamland. Music from the Amelie soundtrack played a helping hand in this as well. A couple of minutes later I heard some feet shuffling back into the room and not long after that I was picked up by about twenty hands who rocked me gently in the air. This was an amazing feeling, although a bit Eyes-Wide-Shut. It’s a bit like you are on the bottom of the sea, floating through nothing. They started walking, I had no idea where to, but I felt completely safe. When – after various minutes of flying – they laid me down again at another place in the building I was very relaxed and had caught up with an invaluable three minutes of sleep! Great experience.

All the other discussions and activities had to do with how to use your senses and what this had to do with being a volunteer. This made me think. Why was I a volunteer for CEAR? And what had my nose, ears, eyes, hands and mouth got to do with it? Well, the first one is a lot easier to answer than the second and it goes a bit like this:

Reason

I am a volunteer for CEAR because I believe that the situation which these poor people (refugees, paperless people, illegal immigrants, asylum seekers, etc.) find themselves is inhuman and unfair. I feel that this is enough. There was a lot of talk why one should be a volunteer. I heard that you had to be an open person, willing to change the world and that personal reasoning shouldn’t play a big role in being a volunteer. I disagree with this. Everybody has their own reasons and these shouldn’t be questioned.

As I mentioned above I was looking for Quality and the President of CEAR gave a good example. His speech on the 20 objectives of CEAR and his personal worry concerning people who not only don’t have papers, but also lack a country (because they are not recognized by anybody, like in the movie The Terminal, therefore lacking an identity), was blatantly filled with Quality. Here is a guy who connects with his job and the problems which have to be faced. Like him, there are many people within CEAR who do this. Crisis

During one of the presentations we were told that crisis should be seen as opportunities to improve. This is something I have heard often before and I felt something was missed. Crisis like the one the President mentioned are not opportunities alone. They are situations created by people who didn’t take the time and effort to foresee where the problem was going. To solve such a crisis, being positive is not the only requirement. As I said, sit down with the problem. Take it apart like you would take a motorcycle apart and then put it together again, and again, and again.

Valiantly, I will leave this problem solving to the others at CEAR. I truly wish I could do more, but for the moment I will just play my small part, something which I hope to increase once I can drop teaching English classes. I walked away from this meeting with the conviction to spend more time working on CEAR issues. This sounds like a new years resolution.

For now, I wish to thank all the people who attended the meeting in Las Palmas, it was truly enjoyable and I learned a lot. At least, it made me feel part of a team, fighting for a general cause.