The British Government announced today that they were withdrawing funding from Voluntary Service Overseas, which was a model the American Peace Corps was based on. The Boris Johnson government doesn’t want to extend funding to other countries. Those countries were once under British rule.
VSO as it was known colloquially was the opportunity for me to leave England, re-invent myself and grow up. A program for those between high school and college, it sent two dozen students each year to far flung parts of the Empire to ‘help’. I don’t remember any other girls in my group, perhaps there were some in other groups that followed us.
I got on a British BOAC flight to Singapore in great excitement, eighteen years old and flying halfway around the world. There were no computers or phones to stay in touch with home, just mail that arrived by plane every few months. During the monsoon season we were cut off from the rest of the world for many weeks. I had never been on an airplane before and had no way of knowing what to expect. Certainly not the ferocious rash that began to cover my body somewhere over Dubai.
The spots got redder and itchier the longer we flew and by the time the plane landed in Bombay the stewards on the plane were talking about ambulances and hospitals. I was terrified. I was whisked away from the handful of boys I was flying with and taken by a little cart to a room in the airport. Indians spoke rapidly to each other, wondering, I was certain, how to get rid of me. As they shouted and gesticulated in unknown language, I sat quietly and afraid in a far corner, the rash began to fade. An hour had gone by and finally a doctor was found. He walked towards me with a frown on his face. He picked my arm up, turned it to look at my palm, took the other arm, asked me to stick my tongue out. My skin was standard British pink and white, not touched by the sun and certainly no longer showing signs of a rash.
Within minutes I was being dispatched to the waiting airplane. I never had a clue as to what happened, and it never occurred again. It was baptism by fire, thousands of miles from home, surrounded by foreign languages, and I was the only one to depend on. The following year reinforced that lesson again and again. I grew. At the end of my year in Malaya I was more mature and relaxed, wishing I didn’t have to return to England. If someone had offered me a decent job I would have stayed in the Far East forever.
Today I am sad that a program started more than fifty years ago is over. I am certain there are still young people that would benefit from a year away from anything remotely familiar, the jungles and mountain villages of my day probably replaced by refugee camps and other monuments to human suffering, the central lesson however, still learning the experience as ‘other’, the lone white face that will never belong.
