My Volunteering Experience

                                                                          ( Draft 1)

I live in rural area and we don’t have any developed infrastructure here such as grocery stores, banks, a pharmacy, a library, a hospital, gas stations. So one day my husband decided to move to the closest city which is located 30 km away for temporary living in hoping to find a job for me and that time was more convenient for his work.

 It was January 2016. We rented an apartment in the centre of city. Location was perfect because I could reach any place by walking in 5-10 minutes. After a few months of living there I started to think about finding a job. I sent my resume into two grocery stores but have not got any responses. One day I met our neighbour and she suggested me to try to find some volunteer work. She said that there is Thrift Shop (in my country we called it Second Hand) in the city and they are looking for volunteers. I went there next day, talked to general manager, left the application. I started working after three days. I worked from Monday to Friday, from 12am to 4pm. Every day was a new team of four-five people. So I met around 20-25 new people just during one week. In that team was one woman from Japan, one from Vietnam, a few people with German, Russian, and Ukrainian background. The oldest member of the team was 92 years old.

The main concept of our store was receiving donations from people, setting low prices and selling it. We had sold everything:  adult clothes, kid’s clothes, shoes, kitchenware, books, DVD, wall pictures, toys, different accessories. That was interesting but very intense job because we had got a lot of donations every day!

My main responsibilities were:  receiving donations, sorting, handing up. Despite intense work we always had some time for having break and drinking a tea or coffee, gossiping, exchanging some recipes, joking. I had worked for three summer months before we came back to our rural area. I was sad because that job had finished for me. I often remember my volunteering job. And now when I go to the city for some reason I always visit Thrift Shop at least to say “Hello”.

I would say that was a simple but in the same time a very useful job. I had got some advantages since I had been working as a volunteer such as meeting new people and friends, better understanding of team work, becoming more confident in myself, improving language skill.

P.S. The latest good new which I have heard about Thrift  Shop. Approximately 1120 square feet will be added to the back of the existing building because donations have progressively increased over the past five years and there is no room to store all the items received!