Chewing gum is usually associated with some thoughtless automatic process. Television has recently become like a chewing gum too. For many years it has been considered the main source of information. But in recent years it has turned out in some endless entertainment full of silly commercials and stupid soap operas. Very often people can’t tell one film from another, or one TV show from another because they are so much alike. For some people watching TV turned into the constant switching of the channels. They fail to find what they like so they prefer to watch a little bit of everything which leads to total absence of any integral or useful information. It is very hard to get a full picture of a film when every five minutes it is interrupted by commercials. Permanent blinking of bright colours and a rapid change of images make people lose the sense of what is shown. In the end they just passively watch the programmes as if they were chewing a gum. And when a programme becomes too boring, they just switch to another channel. And the next day people just take a new fresh chewing gum and chew it till it becomes tasteless and then they spit it out ruthlessly. Don’t you think watching TV is the same?
More and more young people are taking on volunteer work nowadays.
Some even travel to the other side of the world and do unpaid work for a charity or other non-profit organisation there. They help to build homes for poor families, teach children 5 English, take care of orphans, or help to protect an endangered species.
A number of charity groups organise educational programmes for children around the world.
They teach subjects like 10 English and Mathematics to children while staying in their community and getting to know the people and their culture.
Several charity organisations help build houses or schools for poor children around the world. In the village of Kamakwie in Sierra Leone, for example, a team 20 of young volunteers built a secondary school for poor orphans.
For people interested in wildlife, conservation groups organise volunteer holidays throughout the world. You can help wildlife research in countries like Kenya and Botswana or protect 251 turtles in Mexico, Zanzibar, or elsewhere. On Redang Island in Malaysia volunteers come from all over the world to help conserve the endangered green turtle.
A volunteer holiday is for people who want to make a difference in the world and are prepared to give up their own time, money, and, effort to do it. Volunteers have to be realistic though and understand that they cannot change the world in 35 two or three weeks. To some volunteers it seems that they are not doing much by helping out for only a couple of weeks but, in fact, every bit of help counts. Thanks to young volunteers, the lives of millions of people around the world are improving and, in their eyes, the sun is probably shining brighter than it used to.
