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Barack Obama with volunteer Olga Maloszycka in the former concentration camp Buchenwald, June 2009. Source: dpa |
The International Volunteer Program is an exciting experience for both ARSPand its volunteers. People from varying cultures, live, work and learn together for the course of a year. During the seminars, an exchange of the relevance of history in countries and families takes place. How is history remembered differently, here versus there? And how are our relationships and our actions shaped in the present? It is interesting for the foreign volunteers to experience how societies in both the former German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany dealt with the violent experiences of National Socialism, and how it relates to Germany today. International volunteers add their own varying perspectives of the German monologue about history, they ask questions and at the end, they also take questions home to their own societies.
ARSP started the International Program in Germany in 1995. Today there are approximately 20 volunteer placements. The volunteers come from the USA, Israel, and different European countries, including Germany itself. ARSP prefers working with volunteers from partner countries.
Volunteers in Germany work at memorial sites and museums, visit the elderly in the Jewish community and former concentration camp prisoners, support people with disabilities, and work with human rights organizations. Most of the projects are located in cities. Often there are at least 2, or even more, volunteers at one place.
Apart from long-term service Action Reconciliation Service for Peace offers every year around twenty international Sommerlager (summercamps). Students, workers, and others who are interested can work, live, and learn together in short-term projects with others from more than fifteen countries. For the main points of the international work camps there is the preservation and up-keep of synagogues, Jewish cemeteries and memorial centers, helping out with construction and maintenance projects at social projects, and setting up free time activities with handicapped children and adults. However even music and theater workshops or similar projects with the focus on international meetings and contacts are becoming ever more important. With the practical work theoretical discussions occur concerning the issues of the Nazi past, so that a better political conscientiousness for the present and future can be achieved.
The work camps are prepared and lead by two or three voluntary leaders.
The English flyer of the work camp programme in 2009 can be downloaded here.
