The Travel Quandary for Global Aid Workers in the Pandemic
Photo Credit: VSO is working in Nepal on a Covid-19 response program. Voluntary Service Overseas
Skift Take
They say charity begins at home, but for the thousands of overseas volunteers that’s not quite the case. Now they’re wondering how to keep going in a world where travel has mostly stopped.
In March last year, the queue to get into Ninoy Aquino International Airport in Manila snaked around the terminal building. Despite the urgency, volunteers there pleaded for an hour longer to finish off their work before evacuating.
It was a similar story for thousands of aid workers posted around the world. Emergency repatriations didn’t just pose logistical challenges for charity organizations; it meant abandoning their communities.
The professional volunteers in the Philippines were just a handful of hundreds that work for UK not-for-profit organization Voluntary Service Overseas, which rushed to bring them home earlier this year as the pandemic hit.
VSO has 700 staff globally, and 300 international volunteers — mostly technical experts — who stay one or two years in a country. Work can vary from teaching villages about crop rotation and building wells, to emergency aid for countries affected by cyclones and other natural disasters. To date it's worked with 80,000 v
