What does it mean to be a volunteer? What motivates me to be an international volunteer? Am I prepared and trained to be?

At Chazon we understand the international volunteer program as a method of awareness and learning to break down stereotypes and preconceived ideas. Collaborating directly with the local project, in a respectful way, working as a team, dialoguing and internalizing the ways of doing the local culture, the volunteer becomes an agent of change upon his return.

To do this, we look for committed people, willing to learn and train before the trip, open-minded, with critical vision and who want to collaborate from humility, empathy and with ease of adaptation to change.

Chazon is a project that is founded, maintained, and advances throughout the year with highly trained workers in the area who, observing some problems present in their society, decide to take action to change it. Therefore, the work of the volunteer in the field focuses on support and reinforcement tasks to those currently being developed.

The main purpose is to know about their reality and accept the differences, breaking apart with the ethnocentric vision so common in Western culture. Adding, as much as possible, our strength to their work, but accepting our secondary role within a project that arises from and for the population of Molo.

In this way, the most important moment occurs when the volunteer returns home with reinforced knowledge and with transformed social and cultural attitudes that perpetuate human inequalities, promoting social justice.

Chazon Africa proposes volunteering as a means for people to broaden their vision so that, when they return, they can continue to work on their day-to-day basis to fight agains global structural inequality.

If you feel identified with our way of seeing volunteering and want to become a field Chazhon volunteer, we suggest you have a look at a series of documents before you travel to Molo.