Marine, a Sacred Heart volunteer from France, recounts her months volunteering in Indonesia.
At the beginning of 2023, I was lucky enough to volunteer with the Society of the Sacred Heart, for a powerful experience that transformed me and opened my heart to new dimensions. Trained as an engineer, I had decided to take a few months off to give my time to others and live an experience that would enable me to take a step back from everything I had encountered up to now. I was sent to an underprivileged neighborhood in Jakarta, where I was able to help the sisters in the nursery school they ran and give English lessons in the parish elementary school.
First and foremost, this volunteering experience allowed me to live in a new culture and accept the sensation of being an interloper, of not necessarily understanding the cultural codes, and of being a source of curiosity for the locals. As I didn’t speak much Indonesian when I arrived, it was an experience of trust in God and trust in others!
One of the aspects I discovered during my voluntary service was the place of faith and religion in a country where it’s impossible not to have one. Whether Muslim or Christian, the day is punctuated by prayer, and I deeply admired the inter-religious dialogue that reigned. At school, pupils of different religions prayed together in the morning, and blessed the meal together! A real life lesson!
Volunteering has also taught me to let go…completely! Putting the church back at the center of the village goes hand in hand with placing greater importance on encounters than on any kind of program. Being late is no big deal at all, but failing to check on your neighbors in the morning, or to greet and ask for news from passers-by, is! Living one day at a time, putting people at the center, was one of the main lessons I learned.
Finally, volunteering challenged my relationship with time. Coming from a place where everything is so fast-paced, where we complain when a train is late or an e-mail response is too long, I think the main culture shock revolved around time. And how good it feels to take one’s time!
During my first week as a volunteer, a woman knocked on the community’s door with her three children, asking to take them in; she was fleeing the violence her husband was inflicting on her. She stayed several weeks in the community, and having plenty of free time, one day I suggested we make Brazilian bracelets together (I’d brought some embroidery thread “just in case”). Despite not having a common language, I showed her how and we spent afternoons together next door, braiding our threads. We didn’t speak to each other, but the dialogue was nonetheless present in our expressions and smiles. Taking your time also means walking slowly, in every sense of the word. One of the sisters in the community had health problems, and her doctor had advised her to take an hour’s walk every day. So, right from the start, she suggested that I walk with her, and every day we walked together in the neighborhood, very slowly, speaking or not (she was Congolese, what a godsend!).
This dimension of time, and of days that aren’t necessarily very full, made me realize that in the course of our days, even if we had the impression of a certain routine and sometimes even emptiness, a whole host of things were happening! During my time as a volunteer, I liked to talk about the “shooting stars” of each day: all the little highlights (the pride of a child who has just learned something, the smile of a mother who sees her children playing, the joy that reigns at every meal in the community…), which may seem like nothing but are so important, as they show that the Lord is really present, something that can only be witnessed by observing and taking your time.
Section |International News|RSCJ International Volunteers
Province |Belgium/France/Netherlands|Indonesia
