In a year and a half,after training 29 trainers, we had on-field 3,400 community-based health volunteers in five districts who went around their own neighborhood to talk about Tuberculosis, its prevention and how to fight its spread and save the next generation of Karakalpaks.
The experience taught me that volunteering cuts across socio-economic factors -- the ones who went around to share themselves so that others can have the right information, are practically ones who are in desperate need of economic and food security. Poverty may limit volunteering but it does not block anyone from sharing what we (from the other side of the coin) think of as the "little of what they have" --- that is because they share their own selves. That was for me a powerful image of volunteering.
(Gemma Marie Carnacete, UNV Volunteer, UNDP-UNV TB Project: Empowering Communities through Local Volunteerism to Address Poverty and Tuberculosis in Karakalpakstan, Uzbekistan)



