In 2012 I joined the first volunteering team in which my role was to help in delivering assistance
to poor families, plan projects to help to improve rural areas, and to study their cases. After a
year in the association, I joined the media team and I was trying to introduce more people to the
volunteering community, as being a curious person, I joined all the available activities in the
association in my first year, I traveled with them to different spots in Egypt to deliver the help
and the awareness of volunteering and to open their eyes that you do not be rich to volunteer.
After joining this community, I joined different similar associations, till I graduated from university and I joined another community which is ERC( Egyptian Red Crescent); a different route in volunteering in which I helped to raise the awareness of Covid-19 and went to different cities in Egypt to give people in nursing houses and kinds in schools and orphanages Covid-19 kit to take care of themselves and simulating how to handle every emergency situation regarding Covid-19 under the name of the USAID.
Going forward to volunteering out of Egypt, my first experience was in Lebanon when I traveled to join a local organization called Offre Joie, a pure Lebanese charity, with which to retrieve the affected area of the explosion which destroyed 3 neighborhoods and affected more. By volunteering with them I experienced how important it is to have a strong will to help regardless of your nationality, beliefs, language, and even age. The age range of the team was from 14 years old to 76 years old and the team I joined was the team that works in construction work, so we were carrying approximately 2 tons per day. I enjoyed it and it gave me more reasons to keep going on the same track.
Coming here to Romania and joining Yellow Shirts is one of the big steps in my volunteering life; the diversity of activities that I have is helping me to refresh my brain and how different we are; it refreshes my soul. I am not just a volunteer achieving the project goals but also I add my values to it as it gives us the space to create our tasks and activities. Having many options might be tricky, but one of the things that I learned here is to turn everything into opportunities and that’s so we have a mentor who supports us to realize and introduces us to different perspectives of the events we live here.
- Donia