Volunteering and working as a free-of-charge intern for this long poses lots of interesting, introspective questions. Basically you are living daily under the idea, that you only get back what you put into it.
When one has a job, in which they are being paid, there are two major goals in the job. Personal self satisfaction (and I suppose resume building projects), and well…money (ie, sustaining your living). If you are at work therefore, and you are having a bad day or you just don’t feel like working one day, or you want to chat with your friend for a while…be honest, you just ahead and do it. Because whether you are actually doing work or not, you are still meeting one of your goals, and that is sustaining your living situation. You are still making money, whether you are attentively working and constantly seeking out work and projects to do…or not.
When you are volunteering or interning as I am, if you start to goof of, chat with a friend, read the newspaper, whatever it is that people do at work to pretend they are working when they are not….it doesn’t carry the same completion of goals. If you begin to goof off, you begin to ask yourself why are you bothering to be here, if you are not going to work. All that you have is personal self satisfaction and projects and work to put on your resume. So if you are not working hard on those, you are really getting NOTHING out of your time. Therefore, you have to push yourself. Push yourself to not ever stop working, to not ever stop doing things that will build your resume or your person. Why are you here? If not to grow and learn? So you push yourself constantly to be growing and learning, whether it be going to Argentine movies, reading the paper in Spanish, drinking mate with your coworkers, searching out new and more in depth projects at work….but there is little time for rests, breaks, mind erasure, little time to not be seeking out something more to do, some future project to be working on. There is NO sitting around and waiting for your boss to give you something to do. It makes for a very different work dynamic, one in which you are constantly working instead of avoiding doing work.
It is a charming and exciting catch 22. It is wonderful, and character, personal and resume building. But it is also exhausting, to be constantly thinking about spending every possible minute in the best possible way. Taking advantage of every moment, pushing yourself to be a better person, the economics of time lets say Something that everyone should honestly do with their whole lives, but it is just too exhausting.
[...] administrative work and going to the barrios by day, translations and corrections by night. Working as a volunteer and for free and having to constantly self push and self motivate, is drainin…. And one morning I woke up, and realized I was bored to death…and pretty lonely. I was [...]