Five minutes with… Anna Mitchell, Communications Advisor, India

What were you doing before VSO?

I was a press officer with a UK charity. I thought it would be good to volunteer before I got married and settled down. It’s something I’d been thinking about for a very long time and I thought, now or never! I’m on a secondment so I’ll be able to return to my job when I’m back in the UK.

Tell us about the organisation you’re working with.

It’s called Bhartiya Kisan Sangh (BKS) and it’s largely involved with child protection, helping to rescue and rehabilitate children who’ve been forced into labour either through human trafficking or other means. We’re also working with women who have survived or who are vulnerable to human trafficking.

Is human trafficking a problem in India?

Trafficking is a very big problem and one of the places where the problem is greatest is Jharkhand. It’s the second poorest state in India and a huge proportion of women and children are trafficked out of the state into cities around India or further afield.

So where does your job fit in? 

I’m here for four months and my job is to re-launch the website so that BKS can better communicate with partners and donors. I’m also developing a marketing plan for BKS’s livelihoods programme.

What impact will your work have on people at risk of trafficking?

The marketing plan I’m working on with BKS will help them find work placements for women that they have trained as security guards or housekeepers. Those women will then have a secure livelihood, which means they’ll be at far less risk of being trafficked in the future.

You said you’re here for four months – is that really long enough to make a difference?

The work I’ve come here to do is very specific, so yes, I think four months is long enough. Other placements are different – if you’re looking at a whole organisation and building capacity in that organisation, you’d need longer.

What’s the best thing about volunteering?

It has to be the people. I work with some really nice people – they’re very good at their jobs, very talented and very dedicated. And I have a lovely family who live next door to me – we play card games together every evening.

And the hardest thing?

The first couple of weeks were hard - settling in, the culture shock and thinking ‘oh my gosh, I’m going to be here for four months!’ But once that was over, it became much easier. Missing home is the other big thing – I miss my family, my friends and my fiancé a great deal. And getting sick…

Poor you – have you been sick a lot?

I’ve been sick a couple of times due to food poisoning, but I think that’s just something that happens when you’re abroad. Everybody’s so nice when I’m ill.  I have daily visitors bringing me food, checking up on me, taking me to the doctors. So I haven’t felt alone - I’ve felt very cared for.

Tell us about the benefits of volunteering.

For the volunteer, you get an experience of a culture that you certainly wouldn’t get if you were just passing through on holiday. I’ve been travelling in India before and I’d say it’s a world away from the India I’ve seen here as a volunteer. For the organisation, they get a chance to learn about how we do things in other places around the world. Some things they do better here, but some things they can learn from. Hopefully together we can make the organisation a little bit better than it was before.