by Shoko Higuchi

19 November 2008

Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan: That's what the Office Manager of my host NGO said after she took my computer training. This was the very moment when I felt I could bring a contribution to my host NGO as a volunteer.

I am Shoko Higuchi from Japan, a student at Kwansei Gakuin University. From May to September 2008, I worked with a local NGO in Kyrgyzstan as a University Volunteer.

My host organization, the Alliance for Budget Transparency, promotes interaction and partnership between the state and civil society with a mission to facilitate transparent budgets at all levels in Kyrgyzstan. Kyrgyzstan gained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, and the Government is still evolving. The activities of the Alliance aim to support the democratization of Kyrgyz Government.

My main duties and daily activities in the Alliance were to set up an English website for the association and to train local staff how to update it. These tasks will help the Alliance to share experience and information with foreign stakeholders.

This was my first mission as a volunteer with UNV and also the first time I had worked abroad with local staff. Therefore, everything was new for me, and I encountered a lot of differences and difficulties through these four months.

First and foremost, it was difficult for me to get the staff involved in my project. In the first few weeks, I was treated as a guest from Japan at the host organization. The staff didn’t show much interest in my volunteer work. They were just curious about me because I was a foreigner and young student volunteer.

However, I was in Kyrgyzstan not for a cultural exchange, but was sent there on a capacity-building mission. To get over this difficult situation, I tried to think like a recruit of the Alliance. I learned everything about their activities and tried to understand the needs of the staff. I also tried to share as much information about my project as possible, and I often asked them for requests or ideas for the website.

These methods were effective in making the staff interested in my project. In particular, if I adopted their ideas in creating the website, they felt they were involved. Moreover, they became very active and motivated in creating the website and taking my training.

There were also other various difficulties. Once, I lost some trust from the local staff because of a mistake. However I didn’t give up, I confronted the problems and solved them one by one.

Since I experienced more difficulties than I expected, I was uncertain whether I could offer the professional skill and experience the local NGO required. However, the Office Manager said that I had opened her eyes with my technical training for website management, and she became motivated to develop the activities of the Alliance.

After I came back to Japan, she continues to update the website with the skills which she gained from my training. Now I’m sure that I did my best in Kyrgyzstan and made a difference.

In the future, I would like to make use of this experience as a University Volunteer and work to build people's potential and contribute to human development. “You opened my eyes” – these words will surely make me motivated for my work in the future.