There's a certain kind of volunteer who arrives on Monday and has a plan to restructure the school by Wednesday. We've met a few. They mean well. They also tend to learn, fairly quickly, that nobody asked.
Cormac got ahead of that problem on his first day. In his first meeting at Children's Town in Zambia, with Madam Elizabeth and Mr. Bright, the instruction he received wasn't a task. It was the opposite of one.
Use this time to settle in, Madam Elizabeth told him. Get to know the students, the boys, the area. Get involved in as much as you can. Then work out where you might be useful.
It's simple advice, and it says a lot about how a good project works. The people who run Children's Town know what they need. A new volunteer's first job isn't to decide that for them, it's to understand the place well enough to fit into it.
A month in, Cormac says it's working. He has a routine he's still shaping, he feels at home, and he knows who to go to when he needs something. That last one sounds small. Anyone who has moved somewhere new knows it isn't.
His biggest adjustment wasn't the one people usually expect. It wasn't the food or the heat. It was time.
At Lindersvold, every hour of the day was planned, and Cormac liked it that way. "I can struggle to keep myself to my own schedule," he admits. In his first weeks at Children's Town, with teaching not yet back in session, the structure he'd relied on simply wasn't there.
It's a very honest thing to notice about yourself, and a very common one. Plenty of volunteers discover that the hardest part of a new place isn't its strangeness, it's the free time it hands you before you know what to do with it. For Cormac, the answer is already on its way: classes are starting again.
He knows the next stage will change things. Once teaching begins, he'll see the school, the teachers and the students in a different light, and he'll have to adapt all over again. His plan for that is the same as it was on day one: stay open, stay curious.
So far, he's happy and a little excited. He talks about supportive teachers and about how many chances he has to learn, take part and find his own voice. And he's clear about what he wants from the months ahead: to make the most of every day he's there.
A month in, Cormac isn't talking about impact yet. He's talking about routines, about trust, about the people who made room for him. In our experience, the volunteers who start there are the ones who end up being useful.
Thank you, Cormac. And thank you to Madam Elizabeth and Mr. Bright, for the best first-day advice we've heard in a while.
Children's Town is one of the projects where our volunteers spend their six months.