Its content can motivate young Slovak men and women who would like to travel abroad to help people in need after the coronavirus crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic have subsided. The case study on positive examples of Slovak volunteer practice in low-income countries was not created by chance this summer in the Ambrela platform, which brings together 27 development and humanitarian organizations in Slovakia.
Every form of volunteering consists of doing activities for the benefit of other people or organizations without claim to payment. Development volunteering, as its name implies, is carried out in low-income countries, previously referred to as developing countries. It is precisely there that people in need live, who need and welcome our help, support and cooperation. Even development volunteers and volunteer women from the Slovak Republic do not receive a salary for their work, but they often have their transportation, food and accommodation costs covered—for example by the SlovakAid donor within a program of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Ambrela’s new case study presents the experiences of young people who traveled to Albania, Lebanon and Georgia through the sending organization ADRA Slovensko and worked there over a longer period with migrant communities. “Through concrete stories, we try to illustrate how the outlook of the deployed young people changes toward global challenges and future plans. At the same time, we show what mitigation of forced migration looks like through concrete Slovak projects when dispatched young people work directly with migrant communities,” says the author of the publication, Dr. Božena Markovič Baluchová. For their volunteer work abroad, they themselves were migrants, and they can rightly be called ambassadors of change who are much needed—the real faces of the ‘Faces of Migration’ campaign, through which Ambrela tries to explain the topic of migration to the public through the lens of the Global Goals.
By sharing their own life stories in relation to work in migrant communities—whether in their family circles, during lectures in schools, or through the media—the young people depicted in the study try to fight prejudice and disinformation at home, in Slovakia. In the field they worked directly with vulnerable groups and can now put various stereotypical portrayals of migrant people in the proper perspective.
Reduce anti-immigration attitudes through education and awareness
“However, the deployed young people noticed that many fellow citizens around them use the word migrant as an insult and confuse impressions with concepts. Migrants and migrant women cross the borders of their own country voluntarily for work, study, or volunteering. Refugees and refugees, however, flee from home because of war or loss of freedom; otherwise they face death, torture or imprisonment,” warns the study author.
Despite various awareness campaigns, anti-immigration attitudes still persist (not only in Slovakia). One reason is, for example, the insufficient emphasis on training in critical thinking, working with information and media literacy in our education system. That is why Ambrela joined, with partners from across Europe, a project called ‘Global Goals and Migration’, as well as the aforementioned campaign ‘Faces of Migration’. Its outcomes are not only webinars and public events, but also research and the preparation of such studies on this topic.
The Ambrela publication titled ‘The work of Slovak development volunteers and volunteer women in migration-affected areas’, which could inspire young Slovaks and Slovak women to travel on a similar foreign mission, can be downloaded and read for free on the website www.tvaremigracie.ambrela.org.
Text and photo: Ambrela.org