Why I need to volunteer abroad

Even though it is at least a half a year away, I know that the more I'm aware of wanting to learn before I volunteer abroad, the better chance I have of learning it. I needed to set something at least resembling goals... so here they are.

• Education about International Development means nothing without the experience to back it up. A formal, classroom education is not going to teach me what it means to be a citizen of the third world. Living it is the only thing that can even bring me close to that.
• I will be terrified before I leave, and there is the possibility of danger once there. That these are facts are reasons to go. It will cause discomfort, and that is why I need to go. When something makes you uncomfortable, you have to ask yourself why. When you know why, then you can begin to learn about it, and only after you have learned as much as you can about it can you begin to really do anything worthwhile about it.
• I can raise all the money that I want, I can tell all the people that I want, I can do all the research that I want, but what do I really know? Having been there, I will have more credibility when I spread the word. I can say, “I know these things because I’ve seen it, first hand. I’ve tried to live it.”
• As globally minded as I claim to be and hope to be, I live a very selfish lifestyle. I can’t fully appreciate everything I am so lucky to have until I have been without. Despite being cognizant of how much I have and how little the “underdeveloped” world has, I still want: I want that camera, I want that jacket, I want that ice cream…
• I can’t help but think that there’s something (or, more likely, many things) that we don’t know. So many impoverished people still manage to find so much joy in their lives—so I believe that while they deserve a more comfortable lifestyle if they wish it, and they deserve their basic human rights… we have at least as much, if not more, to learn from them as we can possibly teach them.
• Finally... and this is one of my own selfish and probably idealistic reasons: It will break and make me. It will break my heart... but it will make my life. Make my life what? I don't know. That's why I need to go.

Au revoir!