Beyond the limits
By Asia Vaccher
When I was in high school I decided to go on a school exchange abroad, and on my list of countries I would have liked to go to was South Africa at the top. However, life decided on another destination for me, and from there on that country remained in the dream drawer. Community service with ASCS gave me the opportunity to open that drawer eight years later and fly to Cape Town to do a year of volunteer work with the Scalabrini Centre in Cape Town (SCCT).
Everyone talks about the beauty of the city: many Europeans spend their vacations or honeymoons there, among the myriad activities it offers. There is, however, a part of Cape Town that often goes unseen, but which, thanks to the Scalabrini Centre, I have had the opportunity to get to know, and which often cries out for help.
In South Africa there are asylum seekers from countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Rwanda, Somalia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Ethiopia and beyond. The situation is tragic: the system has been stuck for a long time, aid is scarce, people are not informed, and every day there is an endless queue in front of Home Affairs. Everything seems very static, and seeing the impact of what I do is often complicated, because the lives of the people I talk to every day, who arrive at our door in desperate situations, remain so even after they come back out.
This is the biggest difficulty I have encountered so far during my SCU: I feel small in a huge reality, I hear cries for help, but there are not enough resources to respond.
Fortunately, SCU is also about learning how to grow and acquire skills you do not yet have. Talking with my coordinator, a social worker for many years, I realized that sometimes what seems insignificant to us can represent a lot to someone else. During one of our interviews, she helped me change my perspective, telling me that “having someone willing to listen to our story can also be important: it gives you the strength to move forward, it makes you feel like a human being, it gives you dignity, it gives you a name. You exist, and the person sitting in front of you, listening to you, sees you and recognizes you.”
I think this year of volunteering is giving me mostly on a personal level. I came in after various internship and work experiences, and in comparison, I feel that sometimes from a work perspective I don’t learn as much as I would like. However, coming into contact with an unfamiliar country, where the reality of some people is so far removed from what I have experienced before, is forcing me to reflect on thoughts and perspectives that I had never questioned before.
The same is true at the level of living together: community service leads you to share space with other civilist*. Understanding and accepting differences in order to succeed together in an already obstacle-filled year can be complicated, but it is also an important opportunity for personal growth.
