Each week we bring you the story and perspective of an outstanding volunteer. This week, meet Eleni P. Hadjigeorgiou, a Water Brigades volunteer from Imperial College London, who recently participated in a Brigade to Ghana.
Doing my BSc in Human Nutrition I have always wanted to be involved in public health, to do some community work in Africa. I never went out looking for the opportunity until it came and rang my phone. I was studying in the library when my good friend Alexandra called me. She told me that Imperial is going to Ghana in September ’12 for community work. I said immediately count me in! I registered with Global Brigades on that same day and went to the interview two days after where I took the leadership of the hygiene and sanitation education aspect of the mission along with my friend. And quite as simple as that my journey to Ghana has started.
Seven months after, when I first came across with the streets of Accra the weirdest thing happened to me-and surely Virgin Atlantic must take a share in this. It was like the whole trip, all those 8 hours in the plane were nothing but a really long spinning in a chair with wheels. Right there I felt like I never left, from a place that I have never been before. Felt reassured as I knew that despite all doubts I had during the seven months of the anticipation, I was right to follow my heart’s desire to take this trip because I belonged there.
All images I was facing were so raw; it felt like life is the first born daughter of Africa. It cannot be the other way around! No matter how many interventions and how much corruption, she cannot be consumed! Africa’s greatness can only be parallel to God’s: endlessly giving; tough in reality; always more than enough to go around.
The children were the country’s gold. They were everywhere and in their eyes all the hope of the world constantly feeding you with optimism and will to carry on. Their nakedness and the holes in their arms and legs, from worm infections, could only humble you and make your heart expand to the point it hurts.
I was going to sleep with the sound of drums, waking up with the songs of a thousand birds. And for the first time I knew that I 
deserved all that royalness because I lived every day with the single most valuable purpose for existence – to love others.
Everything was perfect during our mission in Ghana and be reassured that it involved all kind of miserable moments: lunchtime crankiness; the exhausted friend on your shoulder trying to get an extra 10min sleep on the bumpy minivan route to the community, the hard work that made your hands and feet bleed and blister all over; the bitter disappointment of not managing to finish the super- optimistic purpose of your mission, leaving the finish up work to another group. Nonetheless this was part of the beauty of the experience and I wouldn’t take any of it back.
My regrets: I wish my heart was bigger so it could fit all the children of Srafa Aboano.
I wish I had more hands so I could build a water tank for each household in the community.
I wish I could speak Fante so I could have made a better use of the few precious hours we had to feed the children’s hungry eyes for knowledge with what is essential to bit their odds of life spam.
I wish that I hadn’t left Srafa Aboano. I wish there were more young people with us to share this experience.
With stress being the drive of young people’s lives that remain under the umbrella of academia and desperation for those already in the job hunting era of their lives, it is of crucial importance to escape the fake reality of it all and meet people that statistically will never taste the comfort of the deception of a free life.
On top of it having the chance to make a positive impact to a community and improve their life quality is very satisfactory. Turning this into a way of living is a blessing indeed.
Volunteering today has nothing to do with philanthropy as it did decades ago. Analogically we take more than we give and since giver and receiver cannot be distinguished there is equality between them both. This is the beauty of volunteering in oppose to philanthropy; we cannot look down to other people because in some ways are less fortunate than us. In the process of enabling them to help themselves through sharing our skills and knowledge at the same time we grow as individuals and personas and acquire new skills.
Whether you want to escape or embrace your individualism, I find volunteering the right way of doing it as through collective and 
altruistic actions you can grow out of your perception of needs and into your real employability needs: team- working; creativity; problem solving; co-operating; enthusiasm to achieve a goal.
Put your limits and abilities into test in the toughest of scenarios. Find out what you are made of and get to know yourself better through volunteering in rural and developing areas. Meet new people and make new friends that otherwise would have never gotten in the path of your life. Ask them of their dreams and what they think of their politicians. In a world that there are subwoofer speakers and music consoles but no access to safe water there definitely must be something extraordinary for you to learn.
