Road to Meeting 2024… Second stage
30 November 2023
My name is Barbara and I have been working in the volunteer office of the Meeting for two years.
I have participated in the Meeting as a volunteer for several years and it has always been an opportunity to grow relationships, journey andwork. When I was asked to be part of its construction, taking care of such an important and delicate piece as the volunteers, I was grateful.
Throughout the year, my job is to make sure that each volunteer can have an
experience, feel welcomed, listened to, and have the best possible conditions to work. This leads me, in particular, to address different aspects: from the modality of registration, the frequency of the course on security, logistics, meal management, to assignments to jobs in the different sectors.
When the Meeting arrives and everything begins, paradoxically I am the person who has the least to do directly with the volunteers and then I ask myself “how can I be the one to take care of this?”.
From this question arose the desire and the need to be able to meet the volunteers both during the Meeting and in the following months, to find out what is happening to them or has happened to them (beauty lived or seen, difficulties, disappointments, birth of new friendships), what makes them come to work for the first time or for the 44th time.
In these occasions of dialogue and confrontation, being faced with questions, discoveries and objections is what moves me the most and at the same time, what most becomes a point from which to start again together to plan the work for the following year.
At one of these dinners a guy told us how, during an interview, he found himself suggesting which places at the fair to show for their beauty or their meaning, surprised because he moved as if he had to show his house to a friend.
It is mysterious that a volunteer can come to treat this place as his home, capturing and carrying within himself what we wish to highlight.
I could do my job perfectly (which is impossible!), but without each person’s choice to dedicate a week of their free time, the Meeting would not exist. We need everyone’s availability.
You too can participate in the construction of the Meeting!
