The Chair of our Board, Alan Jenkins, recently visited a group of our international volunteers at Camp Marysville and was incredibly impressed with our volunteers and the work being undertaken at the camp. Camp Marysville is a new camp transformed on the site of the former Marysville temporary village, which housed residents following the devastating “Black Saturday” bushfires in February 2009 that destroyed most of the town.
Alan shares his thoughts following the visit:
“Inspirational” – that is the word that immediately came to mind as I left our volunteers at Camp Marysville.
During a visit to Australia with our CEO, Joanne Smithson, to visit our colleagues, various partners, supporters and other contacts, I had the chance to visit one of the outdoor camps we support through our volunteers.
Sarah Banks, our Operations Manager in the Melbourne office, and I met the Camp Manager, Caolan, and four of the six Lattitude volunteers placed there. The other two volunteers had been given a well-deserved week off in recognition of the hard work they had recently been doing on weekends.
The first impression Sarah and I had on meeting the group was one of total enthusiasm and commitment. They had been there when the camp was being prepared for opening and had been involved in design, planning and construction, as well as later maintenance.
The purpose of the camp is to give young people a better understanding of the world in which we live, our interdependency with nature and the need to live sustainably.
Since the camp opened in February this year, our volunteers have worked with the visiting campers, as well as continuing with projects to enhance the facilities. Projects they have worked on include a zero waste system for the kitchen and dining hall, a cycle track and a climbing wall. They have also established a competition to minimise the use of electricity and set up the design, construction and safe use of a wood splitting operation.
Our volunteers at Camp Marysville are from Britain, Northern Ireland, Canada and Germany. They live and work together and have clearly learned much in their time at camp, including teamwork, initiative, self-reliance and self-confidence. Each of them spoke of the transformation that their volunteering experience has had. They have all become enthusiastic ambassadors for Camp Marysville and Lattitude – doing our marketing for us as one of them put it!
I could have asked for nothing better as a demonstration of what Lattitude Global Volunteering is about. Let the last words, however, be those of Caolan, who said that our volunteers would leave an outstanding legacy at the end of their time with him.
