It's not necessarily a Swede or an American who will go to Brazil or Botswana. It's often a person from Ghana going to help in Kosovo-or a Nepalese going to help in Tanzania. So you have that mix, which makes the whole program more challenging and more interesting. They hear about us from other volunteer organizations in their own countries or from other international organizations, such as the U.S. Peace Corps. After hearing from other people or reading about the program, they apply to our roster of applicants that we try to place around the world.
Some volunteers work on long-term assignments, while others work in crisis situations.
During the crisis in East Timor, we recruited 500 U.N. volunteers within six weeks-a tremendously fast process. We can only accomplish this through previous outreach to other cooperative organizations that we might be working with in the UK and Ireland, for example. We regularly work with other groups to find good people that we can place. Remember, too, that the average age of our volunteers is 39, so we have many people with solid professional experience-and that's really what we are looking for. Of course, that also means that they must interrupt their careers if they want to participate in our two-year assignments.