Verónica Camarero García (one year voluntary service at Argentina, Buenos Aires)

In 2012 my decision to volunteer led me to beautiful Argentina, more specifically to the province of Buenos Aires, where I lived and worked for a year in nursing home. A home of beloved grannies and grandparents, as we used to call them after those twelve months together.

The idea of ​​volunteering after school has been a very conscious decision and reflected, that was reinforced during a series of preparation seminars that I had with other volunteers and, not least, with myself. I had clear that, before studying or working, I wanted to spend a year out of everything, a year that was only dedicated to my personal growth, it was possible in an ideal and unique moment of freedom of time that I knew I would hardly will have in the future. Also the choice to go to Latin America, later on Argentina, has arose from the a desire to know a continent that was until that moment unknown to me, but that awoke in me a curiosity and an interest like no other continent.

In retrospect to my volunteering program, every time someone asks me about the year in Argentina, it is impossible for me to summarize such an intense and key experience in a simple phrase. For me the experience of my volunteering year (a year away from home) has been one of the experiences and adventures more decisive and those that most marked and directed my path. My stay in Argentina has allowed me to meet a country and its people as I could never imagine, it is a immersive sensation that you cannot experiment on a long pleasure trip or on vacation. I had the luck of have the time available to travel through other countries of the continent and thereby complete more images and understand little by little the immense diversity of Latin America that caught me and amazed me, in fact it still keep calling me.

The experience of my volunteering is unique and at this time I could say that at that time do a year gap was best. That year I pulled out of my comfort zone and I It made me reflect on many levels about my enormous privileges; representing the volunteering itself one of them. To each person who has the opportunity, the desire, the will and the great luck of being able to go to another place to collaborate in the most concrete way and staff, can tell you and recommend with all my certainty that it is one of the best and most lucky decisions that you will be able to make. From my personal experience one of the most important advice I would give you is to avoid falling into the illusion of being able to change the world. We do not do it with a temporary stay that serves most to ourselves. Do not forget to reflect, sensitize and maintain our eyes wide open, maybe in that way we can improve a little and with that, we already change a lot.