If you haven't felt uncomfortable then are you even volunteering?

"A fourteen-year-old from a middle-class family whose parents are doing fairly well in the hospitality sector, living in a moderately well-gated community in the 90's and never having to have heard NO from her parents for any demands, any fancies and for any non-essentials" goes to a fisher's community and tries to sell free pulse polio drops to the community. She cannot think or understand why the free drops shouldn't or wouldn't get any recipients. Who wouldn't want their children to live a healthy life and that too when the drops are free? Even then the first visit attracted only 6 children in two hours that she was there. The community was believed to have 1500+ children under the age of 5. Can you think of various emotions, experiences, and thoughts she may come back with?

The same girl goes for a charity event organised by the Lions club and volunteers to manage a stall where the attendees are the creams of the town, well affluent and so prosperous in their appearance that it doesn't feel less than a wedding! The proceeds from the charity event will be sent to some organisation working toward the disadvantaged. There was food, games, handicrafts, homemade products, and craftsmanship at its best, and everything had a great price tag attached to it. Again can you think of emotions and experiences she may have gone through that day?

She had a great day during the charity auction and she decided the best way to volunteer was to manage such events. She did not want to go back to the community that didn't understand the importance of free health care, the importance of lives, who didn't care if she had wasted her two whole hours standing there in the scorching sun trying to educate them about the well being of their own children, where she had to carry her own water, where the surroundings smelled, there was no place to sit and wherever she looked she saw some need which was left unmet - may be because they couldn't afford it :( She continued to avoid experiences that made her uncomfortable or left her with thoughts of misery.

Most people can relate to the above and understand the plight of the girl- she didn't want to see the trauma, understand the poverty and economics around it, the failure of the society in trying to create social equities, and remain in denial about the huge widening gaps between the charity events and sustainable volunteering in spite of us growing as a country.

I believe strongly that it is in the feeling of failure, the feeling of hopelessness, experiences of getting your hands and feet dirty, experiences of not having enough, not knowing what to do, insufficient knowledge, inaccessible resources, and an inept environment that makes you "uncomfortable" that your volunteering is actually towards and onwards to making an impact, a real impact. Events are about participation, it is the failure of events that is towards engagement. Recount the number of times, you had to manage paintbrushes because they were insufficient for your group; or food wasn't of the quality you expected, or you didn't have gloves to pick up trash from the hills- these are the true impact of volunteering which teach you "surviving in dearth", "overcoming lack of resources", "collaborations", and "creating solutions".

When we realize the paint brushes procured are sufficient and will require principles and learnings of economics and management respectively is when we are optimally using our resources and paving the way for sustainability; when we understand food safety is more important than variety and taste of food along with going local is when we understand how our collaboration can create livelihood opportunities for a group; when we realize our gloves will go to landfills, we understand creating solutions for sustainability. We may have failed the event but we succeeded as a group in understanding why volunteering is important.

If we have felt the discomfort, the quintessential failure - we may be volunteering the right way :)