If I had to choose one word to describe my experience as volunteer in Cyprus at ‘Home for Hope’, I would say intense. It was like experiencing different worlds in one same place, because that very place found itself being the center of many different worlds. And that center is only one of the many centers around which each world rotates. It is impossible to know all of them, and very hard to find a balance.
The advantage and the challenge of this kind of job is the disorientation that the chaos of differences brings to a Western ‘organized’ mind. It rarely makes you feel comfortable. Yet, this constant feeling of uncertainty offers you the greatest thing you can get from an experience: the opportunity of never stopping learning. It makes you question yourself and it allows your imagination travel to places you did not even know existed. Eventually you realize that the real balance consists in acknowledging the coexistence of many centers, and that the ones you see are only a small part of them.
It would be wrong to say that I spent eight months in Cyprus; the Shelter was just a departure point, a gateway to Somalia, Congo, Syria, Guinea, Cameroon, Bangladesh, Pakistan and many other places.
