Preparing for Adventures with pre departure training
When I know I have a day with travel approaching, a kind of fever grips me. It starts a bit before. I see the date hanging there in my calendar, find my mind returning more and more to what needs to be done before that time. Depending on how big the trip is, I might start checking details on line (what’s the weather like there, what clothes will I need, should I screen shot any tickets?). Gradually, as the date creeps closer, I find myself collecting things I might need for the day. Sometimes it’s local currency, sometimes it’s back-up snacks for the journey. The night before, I have clothes laid out neatly over a chair. Bags are packed and laid strategically in front of the door to avoid forgetting.
Why do we do these things? I think, it’s about preparing our brains for taking a “leap of faith”. Stepping into the unknown, whether it’s trying out a new bus route or a new country, is an act of courage. It requires mental “warming up” and when we do these things, we prepare ourselves for being braver and larger.
Last week, on the 30th April, our volunteering team had the privilege of working with 9 young people from Cardiff University. Our job was to prepare them for their own adventure – a three-week exchange to support a school in Thailand. None of our group had ever been to Thailand before but they were going to work with our partners to support young people in Phayao through play and education.
We call these sessions “Pre-Departure Trainings” and they have a few different priorities. The first, (and probably the most obvious) is to help our participants do exactly what I described above when planning a trip: finding the logistical problems and considering how to solve them.
There’s something innately satisfying about bringing a group together to come up with a shared “to-do” list. These nine people all had different approaches to their trip and tackling the research was the first time they got to work together. The “first step” in their adventure was figuring out how they would solve these problems and it was heart warming to watch people who started the day as strangers gathering their skills as a group and bonding over shared resilience: “It was really good to think about the problems and the details of the trip and how we could work together to solve them.”, one volunteer told us. Another reflected at the end of the session “I was worried about raising some of these problems and I really appreciated some of the others speaking up for me”. It’s that collaboration that’s a huge part of international volunteering: coming together as a group to tackle a new place and being empowered by that.
The second aim is helping our participants become comfortable with (and appreciative of) difference. It’s amazing how fast difference can be interpreted as wrongness. Amazing how unsettling it can be when we as people come up against differences of culture, character or even habit. As trainers, it’s always illuminating to reflect on the differences that we find it hard to tolerate. There are generally a lot of them even within our own cultures that we don’t particularly notice. For example, think how you respond when someone wears clothes you don’t like or sits in “your chair” in the office. Being put into an environment where their “normal” and yours are different is a great way to reflect on why you like things a certain way. It can also be a trigger for “culture shock” and if you’re not expecting it, it can feel like a slap of cold water! Speaking about these things that are both so familiar and so unfamiliar was really useful for our nine. As one participant said “I loved the theory of change. It was great to become more familiar with it.”
The final aim is to enable our participants to practice something that will be at the centre of their experience: get to know new perspectives. The informal approach we take for our training is always designed to bring people together with food, with games, with discussions. What starts out as strangers embarking on a journey together can become a group of synthesised perspectives, all willing to have conversations about things that matter to them and all interested in finding out more about things they might not have experienced before. That is not to say that we (or our participants) always share exactly the same ideas or experiences – what a boring world it would be if we did. However, through being able to embark on self-reflection and take adventures in new places, they get to hear the stories and experiences of a wider range of people. They get to look at cultures unfamiliar to them. Finally, they get to decide what parts of their experience they want to build back in to their own lives.
Our nine students will be taking their Thailand experience in June and we will be excited to hear how it went in their debrief session which will take place at the end of the Summer. If you would like to know more about our Pre Departure offer or out international exchange programme, do get in touch with us at volunteering@cymru.global