News of disaster and famine provokes many of us to make donations to aid agencies – but what drives the growing number of Scots who leave behind their homes, jobs and families to volunteer in some of the most dangerous and deprived parts of the world?
ROGER DEAN'S office in the Sudan reached 55ûC in the dry season. Outside, the scrubby, dusty semi-desert was baked hard; inside, the 30-year-old Scot was bathed in sweat. He went to work at 4am once to see if it was cooler, but the temperature never dropped below 38ûC in that room. Dean worked as a logistician for Goal, a Dublin-based international aid agency. Goal does disaster relief and social development programmes. It doesn't do air-conditioning. After weeks of intense build-up, Dean would watch clouds forming overhead, swelling until they burst with the phenomenal biblical rains of the wet season. Overnight the temperature would plummet 20ûC, torrents of water bouncing off the earth, drenching the clay-like soil, creating rivers of mud in which the wheels of his car would simply spin helplessly.
It puts rush-hour traffic on the M8 into perspective. Or that irritating computer glitch at work. Add the fact that Dean was working in a voluntary capacity, with only a basic allowance instead of a wage, and his employment choices become even more interesting. We live in a society that celebrates 'me' over 'you'. If anything captures the zeitgeist of our times, it is advertising campaigns telling us we deserve expensive things. Why? "Because I'm worth it." Who says? Well, me, mainly. And those who want my money.
So what makes a child of the 'me' generation run a supply base in Sudan, or work 48-hour shifts in an Islamabad hangar to bring emergency supplies to Pakistanis traumatised by earthquake, as Dean did? And is he any happier than the rest of us?
Materially, we are more affluent than ever before. Research suggests we are also more unhappy. Last year, Affluenza, written by the psychologist Oliver James, showed that the wealthier a country was, the more stress and depression its inhabitants suffered.
Professor Phil Hanlon of Glasgow University is undertaking government-sponsored research into the relationship between our way of life – or culture – and our well-being. "A new set of problems in public health in Scotland has emerged in the last 20 years," he says. "I'm not talking about the problems everyone is familiar with, such as heart disease, cancer, respiratory disease and so on – we're combating those illnesses. What we're not combating is depression, obesity, addiction, alcohol-related illnesses and sexually transmitted infections. Our culture is characterised by materialism, consumerism and individualism, and our analysis is that modern society has reached the stage of creating diminishing returns or even harmful effects."
Hanlon's research asked people whether they recognised that analysis of Scottish society. Most did. "And if you prompt them for a deeper cause, such as loss of purpose and meaning, or disengagement, would that have any resonance for them? We wondered how hard we'd have to dig, but it turned out you don't have to dig at all. You just have to scratch the surface and people will pour this stuff out to you."
We are money-rich and time-poor. We can indulge more of our material needs than ever and less of our psychological ones. And for those at the bottom of the heap, who can't indulge either, the result is complete social exclusion. Increasingly, people are choosing another route. For some, like Dean, that may involve aid work. But it's only part of the story. "There have always been people who have done that: responded to religious calling, to idealism, to humanism and so on," says Hanlon. "But there is also a bigger phenomenon, the so-called downshifting phenomenon, where people voluntarily move themselves out of the fast lane and take a reduction in their standard of living so they can improve relationships, increase meaning, purpose, a sense of belonging, a sense of direction in their life."
Down a track in the village of Nethy Bridge, in the Cairngorm mountains, is the Lazy Duck hostel, a camping and self-catering site. On a crisp bright day, a thin sun shining watery rays on the miniature wooden bridge and duck pond, this place feels as if it is suspended in time. It is beautiful and calming, and as far from the rat race as you can imagine. It is owned by Dean's parents, who once ran a school for children with behavioural problems here. Their son retreats here when he comes home between jobs because he has no property of his own, none of the tangible signs of success that other men his age might expect.
He first went to Africa in his gap year and fell in love with the continent. His university thesis was on the Sudanese civil war, a piece of work that won him a job at the Financial Times in London. Later, he would return to Africa as a BBC foreign correspondent in Tanzania. When it was time for a change from journalism, but not from Africa, he applied to Goal. But has he traded his chance of 'normal life' back home? "I haven't traded it, I've deferred it," he says. "It's difficult to tick every box. There will come a time I'm sure when life doesn't work for me the way it works now. There's no doubt about that. This is a voluntary job. For the first year you get a subsistence allowance. After that you get a wage, but it's not the kind of wage that's going to get you a mortgage."
He is a thoughtful man, who admits his motivation is mixed. "The sense of adventure is certainly there. But there's genuinely a significant part of it that is about making things better for others. You've got to stand up for some of the things that matter. It's not just about helping the poor, but about the effect the daily grind of poverty has. And power in Africa is partly derived from very traditional, tribal structures. It's not a place with a tradition or history of standing up to the system. If you want something to change, you work inside the system and lobby and persuade, but you don't revolt. So it's hard for people to feel they are in control of their lives."
Once, all that was required of charity workers was a heart of gold. But in the modern world, aid agencies don't just want do-gooders. They want professionals: doctors, accountants, engineers. Their role is largely organisational. A doctor working with Goal is less likely to spend time immunising children than teaching local doctors how to organise and implement immunisation programmes. Training is a key part of the work – that way, when the individual doctor goes home, the work continues. When Dean was sent from Sudan to Pakistan to do four months of emergency work after the earthquake, it wasn't westerners who were digging the dead from the rubble. The Pakistani people did that for themselves. Instead, volunteers like Dean were working 48-hour shifts in the background, organising and transporting emergency supplies and equipment. "It's not phalanxes of whities coming into fix things," he explains. "It's community-led."
In Pakistan, he witnessed the bonding effect that could have. "People saw the international community pitching in with good will and solidarity, and for some it was a revelation. For such a long time they had been told that the West looked down on them, that they were disliked because of their faith, and they realised a great deal of this was simply made up by people for their own reasons. When we first got there, the girls in our group put on headscarves. This, admittedly, was one of the less excitable regions of Kashmir, but after a couple of days folk were coming up to them and saying, 'Look, we know you're different. You don't need to wear the headscarves.' They took them off." And Dean was astonished when a fundamentalist group gave them a Christmas cake. "It knocked our socks off."
What about the emotional cost of the work? "I don't get angry. I get indignant." He pauses. "Maybe I do get angry. But there's always horrible stuff and I know what we are trying to alleviate. I know what needs to be done and so all my emotional energy goes on trying to make it happen rather than being brought down by it." Volunteers like Dean are working with teams of Goal-employed local workers who give them a sense of perspective. "These people aren't there for a year to fix somebody else's place. This is their home. This is where their roots are. This is where their grandparents are in the earth. They have been through it all, through decades of war that we haven't seen, and they are there, focused and getting on with what they need to do. And that stops you from being too self-indulgent."
SHE CALLS HERSELF 'Sleepless in Sudan', the anonymous aid worker who pours out her daily life in a nightly blog. The most horrific sights and stories don't make her cry, she writes. It's self-protection. But she gets inexplicably tearful looking at a hand-painted birdhouse perched among the pines in a residential area near her home. "To think that someone had the time, the resources, and the compassion for a few little winged creatures to erect this bird haven for no particularly pressing reason suddenly seems like the ultimate luxury to me – a kind of luxury that I'll be unlikely to see in Darfur for quite a long time."
Maybe it sharpens your emotional capacities. But sometimes you need a partner to share that with, and the few men around have terrible chat-up lines. "I've seen so much today, I just can't face sleeping alone." Sleepless finds herself a man but he doesn't last. "He's an aid worker… a hero out to save the world… desperate to do a good job and help people… all of which is well and good, but it seems to leave him with precious little time to add any lovely new people – aka me – to his life."
Penny George, a civil servant working in tourism for the Scottish government in Edinburgh, hopes it won't be that way in Opuwo, Namibia, where she is about to take up a two-year contract with VSO in a tourism development post. VSO used to be associated with students on gap years. Now the average recruit is 38 and volunteers are accepted up to the age of 75. George's mother is so envious of her daughter's impending adventure that, at 63, she is applying too.
"I'm doing this partly because of the age I've got to, partly just because of personal dissatisfaction," explains George, a friendly, outgoing 35-year-old. "Everyone I know is getting married, having babies or getting a dog. It just hasn't happened for me. I have been on my own for a long time and I feel more and more isolated in my own community because I am alone and nobody else is."
She was brought up in Falkland in Fife and, although she has plenty of friends, she has never relished modern city life in Edinburgh. "I don't think there is any support network or bonding in the city, but I imagine those things will be so much stronger in an African community. I think that's what they have that we don't – a real sense of community, and a real sense of family."
She will live in a simple house but have a car and tent and be expected to drive to mud-hut villages to explain the concept of tourism and help the local communities to develop businesses. But with her pale skin and long blond hair, won't she be the outsider? "There are two communities I hope to be part of. Hopefully I can make friends with the locals and be part of that, but there will also be the volunteer community to join." She wouldn't plan an African boyfriend because cross-cultural relationships are too hard. She smiles. "But you never know what will happen."
George's love affair with Africa began as a student when a friend invited her to an African dance and drumming class. She immediately wanted to visit. When she finally toured the continent, it was Namibia that made her want to stay. "It's four times the size of Britain but the population is smaller than Glasgow's. It's empty and it's desert and it's a really beautiful, unspoilt landscape. I love the image of Africa that everyone has, of sunsets and sunrises and big animals. And that's exactly what Namibia is. I just love it."
She is due to leave later this month. Giving up western affluence doesn't worry her at all. "I can't wait to get on that plane with just two bags. I won't have to worry about knickknacks and unnecessary things. The thought of having no possessions is absolutely fantastic. I am not a very materialistic person, so the less the better."
George's mother often took her travelling when she was young. She has always had a free spirit and is happy to rent out her Edinburgh flat and make use of her masters degree in tourism. Tourism is increasingly important to developing countries but at the moment it's the Americans and Europeans who own the big resort hotels and the beaches, with just 10p in every pound spent there benefiting the African people. George wants that to change.
"This is just a progression of my career. Some people find that hard to understand. It's an alien concept to my dad, for example. To him, progression in your career is making more money and working your way up the ladder, and I'm not interested in that at all." Even her mother, despite her love of travel, was resistant at first. "It was, 'You're leaving the civil service! What about money? What about your pension!' But what's the point of spending all your life being miserable just to make sure you've got a good pension? And that's how a lot of people live."
Will she be happier? "That's the plan. I am hoping to build a personal life. I've sat here for ten years and not met anybody so something's got to change." Perhaps it will work out for her, though it didn't for Sleepless in Sudan. Sleepless and her aid worker parted. "They may have better intentions and objectives than other men and they may have more noble aspirations in life. Clearly, they even have better excuses for not calling you over here in Darfur – but at the end of the day they are still men who don't call."
THE MODERN CHARITY worker is as likely to give self-centred explanations as altruistic ones for doing what they do. And that, says Professor Hanlon, might be very wise. "If you go to learn, you might do some good. You have more chance of making a contribution than if you are convinced of your own moral superiority or go with missionary zeal."
Aid workers motivated by religion have almost disappeared, says Maura Lennon at Goal's head office in Dublin. She was one of Goal's first ever volunteers and spent 15 years abroad, leaving for Ethiopia in 1984 around the time of Band Aid and only a month after qualifying as a nurse. "I wanted to feed black babies," she says. "It was idealistic and innocent. Aid has changed radically, but volunteers still need a strong humanitarian spirit." She has three children now but would like another posting as a family.
Ten years ago, Goal had 40 volunteers. Today it has 135. The charity has grown, its budget rising in the same period from £6 million to £60 million, but recruiting volunteers – and retaining them – is still the major challenge. In Ireland, huge economic growth has made a historically mobile people less adventurous. Affluence may breed stress but it also breeds fear. "People don't want to risk falling off the career ladder," says Lennon. "You fear your rivals will fly past you if you're away for two years. It's very cut-throat and ambitious."
Helen Ord, a 28-year-old accountant originally from Angus, has just returned from a year working for Goal as its financial controller in the Congo. She had always wanted to visit Africa. She also wanted 'financial controller' on her CV. "I said I would go on the basis that it's personal development as well as international development. If you can recognise that and don't think you're going to save the world, you come out a lot less pessimistic about life than other people do."
But she gave up a £42,000-a-year job at one of the world's leading accountancy firms, taking her expertise to the voluntary sector. "I thought, 'I won't make any impact if I go and just sit in a mud hut and cuddle little black babies for a year and be totally selfish.' If you work for a big organisation, you personally might not make the impact, but there's more chance the organisation itself will."
Ord thought she was at the perfect stage in her life to go: no mortgage, no children, no partner. But, shortly before she was due to leave, a close friend who had been supportive of her move became her boyfriend. "Leaving Heathrow was horrendous. But once you arrive there are so many new things to distract you. It was easier for me than it was for him because of that." Their relationship survived the separation, but with hindsight the couple say they might have considered a joint application.
Although Goal works in precarious countries and situations, neither Ord nor Roger Dean ever felt their lives were in danger. "It felt no different to the danger of living in London," says Ord.
She returned home in September and, while it was tempting to stay longer, she knew she didn't want to have a career as an aid worker. "One very experienced woman, who was in her 50s or 60s, said to me, 'I've got two really nice houses in Ireland and an incredible life story I can tell people, but I haven't got anyone.' I think the long-term career aid workers have to go home to look for someone, or find someone out there who wants to go to the same countries. You do get organisations who offer accompanied posts, but it can be a lonely life."
Going for her debrief in Dublin was disconcerting. "At the end they said, 'Well, thank you very much, keep in touch.' You go from being a big cheese in your office in the Congo to being history."
And there was that strange feeling of having fulfilled the dream and not knowing what to replace it with. "I'd been wanting to go to Africa since I was 16 and I had come back and was wondering what to do next. I wanted it to be something that became a pivotal moment: 'before Africa I did this… after Africa I did that'."
It will be some time before she can assess the impact volunteering has had on her life. "Before you go to Africa you expect to have a real life-changing experience, for everything to be different as soon as you get back. But you've got to work to make things different. I think it will six months before I'll know if I have changed or not."
As for the Congo, she thinks she made a difference. That's the aim. The Scots missionary John Keith Falconer once wrote, "I have but one candle of life to burn, and I would rather burn it in a land filled with darkness than in a land flooded with light." Lovely words, but bringing light to darkness is unlikely to be the way modern aid workers describe their role. Roger Dean has a new assignment, with Goal, setting up an HQ office for its Democratic Republic of Congo programme. His aspirations are entirely pragmatic. "We're not there to fix things," he says. "But we can provide sticking plaster when things get difficult." r
For more information, see
www.goal.ie and
www.vso.org.uk making a difference: charity in the UK
People in the UK donated an estimated £8.9 billion to charity in 2005–06.
The number of charities registered in the UK has grown from around 120,000 in 1995 to more than 164,000 in 2005.
People who make donations of more than £100 are more likely to be giving to religious causes, says the Charities Aid Foundation.
Gift Aid (where the tax already paid on the sum donated is reimbursed by the Treasury and added to the donation) is currently worth an estimated £750 million a year to charities, up from around £100 million ten years ago.
According to the Charities Aid Foundation, the people most likely to donate are married women (62% of whom give).
A man is more likely to give if he is married, or living with a partner. On average, 52.5% of married men give to charity compared to 43.9% of single men.
Statistics suggest women are more likely to donate to animal charities if they live alone.
The five charities that receive the most donations in the UK are Cancer Research, the National Trust, Oxfam, the British Heart Foundation and the Royal National Lifeboat Institution.
UK donors gave £390 million to help the disaster relief effort following the Boxing Day tsunami.
