DIJober Program: Are you prepared for it?
It was April and I was talking to a friend of mine about his job in Norway. As he was talking I was getting more and more excited and in the end he suggested that I should enroll and I said ok. I told him that I would need to finish my scholar year as a Basic School Physical Education teacher and so I did. In the middle of June I arrived to Hornsjo.
I had read in these newsletters he has sent me later this conversation that it was very hard to leave your home, your friends, your country, but I was thinking this reports were coming from weak people and that it was meaningless to me. It was truth till I saw the end of my home town signposted in the road. In a second I felt a full contraction of the muscles in my chest! I was breathless and crying like a baby! I didn’t understand because I was counting the days to my departure and extremely motivated to start the program.
From the day I arrived till the beginning of the team work, I’ve worked eight hours per day, six days a week. When I started the team I was still missing 11 NOK. It’s almost ridiculous but my point is that if you want to reach your money goal, you must be sure about what brings you here. If you’re not, you will easily become depressive and end up quitting.
During these four months I took every job there was. For the hotel I’ve been carpet cleaning, scrapping and painting walls, dishing, cleaning and making rooms, repairing, building wooden frameworks for the roof, driving, shopping, serving, working in the bar, and others I don’t remember. For the Clothes Collection Department I’ve been filling the lorry with our second hand clothes and driving/collecting in Lillehamer, Gjovick, Hammar and Trondheim routes. At one point, Mathias (hotel responsible) and Isabel (Clothes Collection responsible) were “struggling” for my services. It was reward full knowing that my work was appreciated and that I was useful for the community. It helped me a lot keep going with the program.
It’s time now to write about something else. The unique opportunity of living an international Big Brother, with every consequence it can have. The greatest challenge is to deal with a wide range of different aged people coming from different countries/regions Therefore, each one of us has is own background and way of thinking. Besides we all enrolled with different purposes. Reaching a common opinion it’s often not very easy and sometimes you need to be really flexible.
At the moment I’m writing these lines I’m filling in my first quality control, concerning to the first month from the begging of the October team work. My conclusion is that I’m now much more overloaded with work and responsibility than before, in spite of having three less fundraising days in the schedule.
My opinion is that this program can be a lifetime experience, but only if you are ready for it. Like I use to say using a Portuguese based idiom, “volunteering is not for the ones who want to do it; it’s for the ones who actually can do it”.
Bruno “Corleone” Ferreira
http://www.drh-norway.org/