When I look at the CORD Sri Lanka blog, I feel proud. I am always impressed by the great work that the CORD staff is doing in the north of Sri Lanka. However, I am proud because with every blog post, the CORD staff and field officers are using some of the skills that I taught them.
I visited Sri Lanka in October and November of 2012. I was there to attend a friend’s wedding and to spend some time exploring the island. It was my first time in South Asia. I didn’t know much about Sri Lankan culture. I didn’t speak any of the local languages, and I had no concrete plans for what I would do in the time after the wedding. However, from past travels, I knew that something interesting was bound to turn up.
Indeed, it did, when I met Mrs. Gowrie Mahenthiran. After learning that I was an artist and a photography teacher, Mrs. Mahenthiran quickly recruited me to teach her Colombo and Jaffna staff how to set up and maintain a blog. I gladly agreed. I knew it would be the perfect chance to learn more about Sri Lankan culture while at the same time helping an organization that is doing very important work.
Over the course of a week I taught the basics of setting-up and maintaining a blog website. I also spent a couple of eye-opening days in the Jaffna area teaching the field officers how to take better photographs and video, and how to collect the information needed to write blog posts on CORD’s work.
During my time in Jaffna, I was immediately struck by just how much good work CORD was sponsoring. Every day that I was at the Jaffna office there were workshops and training sessions. It impressed upon me how important a blog was in order to show CORD Sri Lanka’s worldwide supporters just how much work is happening on the ground every single day.
With a very limited time in which to do the work, the training I provided covered only the basics, but the basics were enough to get the blog up and running. Fortunately, I was working with CORD’s dedicated and intelligent staff members. They were ideal students.
The most rewarding part about volunteering with CORD, in particular, was the chance to engage with their team in a field that I truly enjoy and love (photography and social media). In many volunteer experiences, the volunteers end up working as nothing more than an extra pair of hands. This is sometimes needed, but far more rewarding is a chance to share your own particular strengths and enthusiasms while helping others at the same time.
Alexandra Huddleston
2/20/13 – New York City
Kamaleswary and Nandhini try out their new video skills on their teacher
Kamaleswary photographs a group of children whose education is sponsored by CORD. We had just finished a day of training with simple photographic and video techniques.
One of the CORD field officers experiments with conducting a video interview for the first time.
Women from the Jaffna area attend a training session on entrepreneurship and empowerment.
