In 1958, a man called Alec Dickson realised that there were people desperately in need of help and people who wanted to help them. But there was no satisfactory way of getting the two together. So, largely through personal contacts, he organised cheap (and sometimes hair-raising) passages for 18 young people to various far-flung corners of the world. Most of them were school-leavers, without any formal qualifications beyond a few A-levels, good health, and a willingness to turn their hands to anything. Surprisingly, they made a good job of what they went out to do. They made friends too, and other people and other countries began asking for similar young people. When there are only a handful of graduates in an entire country, even a year’s help from an 18-year-old with three A-levels is valuable, especially when the 18-year-old is working for little more than his keep.
From that engagingly amateur start in 1958, Voluntary Service Overseas has blossomed into an organisation which this year sent 1,400 young people to 60 countries. They are no longer just school leavers. Now two-thirds of them are graduates and qualified volunteers, nurses, teachers, agriculturalists, foresters, engineers. They go for one or two years, and V.S.O. (with substantial help from the Government) pays for their recruitment, selection, training and passage. Board, lodging and pocket money comes from the host country. Although they volunteer, they are not altogether free for they can cost their new bosses as much as £600 a year. The fact that they continue to be asked for in growing numbers is some measure of their value.
V.S.O. was the first but it is not the only organisation which sends people rather than money overseas. There are half a dozen more in Britain alone, and Canada, West Germany and France are among the other nations to have similar programmes. But perhaps the most famous volunteer organisation to follow in V.S.O.’s footsteps, is the mammoth Peace Corps of the United States. It has around 14,000 members working in 46 countries. In fact, it is difficult to go to an underdeveloped country without tripping over some kind of young volunteer for there are more than 20,000 of them scattered about.
There are two ways to begin any comment on ‘young people’ or ‘the problems of the younger generation’ these days. One talks about hippies and drugs and flower people. It is sensational and generally disapproving. The other usually goes something like ‘not all young people are idle layabouts or paranoid delinquents, many ordinary young people today are doing worthwhile things, making sacrifices . . .’ and what follows is generally admirable but boring. But doing something worthwhile and ordinary is not boring. Especially if being an ordinary engineering apprentice, an ordinary school leaver, an ordinary graduate, means opting into life – not out of it. And if it means opting into a dramatically new kind of life, on a different continent, rising to a whole set of challenges that could never have existed in Bath, or Bognor, or Bootle.