Unafraid of change

Matt and Polly Freer with Grace Phiri in Mapalo, Ndola (Photo: © Fad Sakala)

Before we met we had both spent a year volunteering in rural Africa supporting the work of the local church, which, coupled with a joint background in community development, meant it was no surprise to anyone that we wanted to return to Africa for a longer period after we were married.

Having both worked for Tearfund, an international relief and development NGO, we were not short of contacts with local organisations ‘on the ground’.  However, we wanted to go through an organisation that specialised in building long-term links between different cultures and sharing cross-cultural experiences with others in Britain, our home country.

We soon chose to explore opportunities to volunteer with the Church Mission Society (CMS) for a number of reasons.

Polly Freer chatting with Grace, leader of a home-based care project, and Albert, a patient, on a home-based care visit for people living with HIV/AIDS (Photo: © Fad Sakala)

We are both Christians and wanted to work with the church, which is generally seen as a local community network ideal for bringing long-term sustainable development.

CMS has over one hundred years of experience in building links with churches around the world — but we were probably attracted more by the fact that it is an organisation not afraid of change, open to experimenting with the new and drawing on the past.

With a strong support base from across the UK and the world, CMS is a movement of people building a global community — allowing us all to learn from one another, and opening up opportunities for us all to question our own cultures.  That struck a chord with part of our own reasoning for volunteering.

Having left our jobs, packed and moved in with parents, we were ready to leave the UK but ended up waiting three months for visas — and even when we did arrive we were soon seconded to work for a different organisation in another part of the country — but that is all part of the adventure!

We are supporting a national organisation in Zambia to fight poverty through empowering local, economically poor communities to stand up and speak out against the injustice of poverty, to train leaders and to build global partnerships.

That is really important for us — we are not entering a country and just doing our own thing; we are working for a Zambian organisation, run and governed by Zambians, in which we can offer support and help but which exists without us or a foreign organisation telling it what to do.

Our work includes working with women’s groups offering home-based care to people living with, and affected by, HIV/AIDS; helping a community to assess their needs and lobby their local decision makers; and preparing proposals, planning national campaigns and looking after visitors.

Matt Freer and colleague Mwiya Mwandawande sharing a joke (Photo: Polly Freer/CMS)

Through such a set-up we are able to use and share some of our skills and experience as well as learn new skills from our Zambian friends and colleagues — and that helps us to question our own culture in new ways.

The fact that we have experience of working for, and thereby have relationships with, donor organisations, and have come through CMS with support from churches and individuals in the UK means that we can help to build the links between the people and work here and there.

Hopefully, this helps to construct and deepen relationships building the world-wide church community — and prevent the donor/recipient imbalance that has often plagued such relationships historically.

Polly Freer playing with children while visiting homes in Mapalo, Ndola (Photo: Matt Freer/CMS)

It isn’t always straightforward but that is the beauty of cross-cultural exchange.  It provides us too with the privilege of standing with, and speaking up, for those who are suffering in the world.

Being part of a wider long-term movement enables us to share that experience, both the joys and the suffering, with other people from our own culture.

The component of faith integral to the work has helped to provide a shared understanding and passion and enhanced our experience.

The above text is a slightly abridged version of a ‘case study’ written for The International Volunteering Handbook, a Lonely Planet publication due to be published in 2007.  CMS would like to thank Korina Miller for her help with this article.