Dennis Mairena (w/ blue cap) talks to community members in Chocó, Colombia (UNHCR Venezuela/Andrea Simancas)Sy Koumbo Singa Gali is one of 700 UNV volunteers supporting MONUC, where she is serving as public information officer. (Miriam Asmani/MONUC)

I come from a very large, very poor family from an isolated rural area. Unlike many around me, I had the great fortune of travelling, learning and acquiring skills, and I feel a moral debt, a desire to give back and share with others my knowledge and experience. I have always believed that real development starts at the bottom and makes its way up-this conviction inspires my work in grass-roots development and with refugees and displaced persons in my region.

As a UNV volunteer, I am now responsible for verifying, monitoring and advocating the rights and protection of displaced persons in Chocó, an area much afflicted by the ongoing conflict between guerrillas and paramilitary groups. I spend a lot of time on the road or more accurately "on the river", travelling for hours in canoes and visiting displaced communities. My UNV colleagues and I participate in village assemblies and together with the communities identify social, economic and protection challenges. We then accompany them in the journey to make their needs and voices heard, vis-à-vis municipal authorities. The combination of the UN flag and being a volunteer helps a great deal in earning the trust and confidence of all parties.

I believe there is a lot of indigenous capacity that should be mobilized and I am working on an idea to do this through volunteerism. I would like to work with several institutional partners to launch a programme involving young university volunteers. These volunteers would form "multidisciplinary teams" to support both displaced persons and reception communities. This is not in my terms of reference -- it is an idea I have had and would like to pursue. To be a UNV volunteer is to be in a different dimension; it gives you a certain "moral authority", vis-à-vis the people you serve, that you cannot attain quite in the same way as a paid employee. Volunteers are able to get especially close to and learn about the communities they work with, be they in rural or urban settings. And I find personal satisfaction in being driven by the motivation of solidarity.

Dennis Mairena is a UNV volunteer, currently serving as field officer with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Colombia. He has spent 20 years working in rural development and 12 years with refugees and displaced persons in Central and Latin America.

'Volunteers always seem to go the extra mile'

For 17 years, I have devoted myself to the practice of journalism in my home country, Chad. What motivated me to work as a UNV volunteer was to take advantage of all of this experience and share it with others to whom it could be of service. Chad has been perpetually war-stricken, and it has never been easy for us journalists to work in a country at war. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, unfortunately, has also been experiencing a similar situation for nearly a decade. I felt that there would be similarities in the approach to the job in both places.

In a peacekeeping mission like the UN Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC), any contribution, no matter how small, helps advance the peace process. My contribution as a UNV volunteer is to help make the Mission's efforts towards peace more visible to the Congolese people, so that they understand the importance of its presence in the country. Many do not understand why MONUC is here and, in the context of the elections, parts of the population mistakenly assume that the international community explicitly favours one side. This is not the case since the Mission's role is limited to supporting the peace process. This message needs to be driven home continuously-and that is my job. My experience with restrictions on the freedom of the press in my country has made me aware of how easily rumours can spread and become dangerous. I take my job of conveying accurate information very seriously.

I am delighted to be a UNV volunteer, because I feel that I am constantly learning new things that I would not have been privy to in my home country. Being a volunteer is a very unique engagement, a conscious commitment to serve. My vision of my job revolves around the idea of volunteerism for development, and I am working with other volunteers to promote this idea. We volunteer after office hours and we are getting ready to use the International Volunteer Day to spread the message. I have the impression that volunteers always seem to go the extra mile-it is in their nature.

Sy Koumbo Singa Gali is one of 700 UNV volunteers supporting MONUC, where she is serving as public information officer. A well-known journalist in Chad, she was formerly Managing Director of the independent weekly L'Observateur and a vigorous defender of a free press.