Preface

Annina Lux

 

Annina is the project coordinator and founder of VOICE and the editor of A Definition of Snow. She founded VOICE after working for five months for an international humanitarian organisation in a rural hospital in Bolivia.

 

One of the most vibrant memories from my time in Bolivia is about snow, or rather the absence of it. Bolivia is as diverse in geography as it is in language and culture, and while snow can be found in some parts of the country, my workplace was far away from all of them. Working in the local hospital, many of my colleagues started to gain an interest in what Germany, my home country, and Europe in general looks like. Many of our conversations on the differences between the two countries were about the weather, one of the favourite topics of my Bolivian colleagues. Following a particularly humid heat wave in the Bolivian rainy season, with temperatures going above 40 degrees Celsius and the humidity making you dream about having a cold shower whenever the running water was working, I came to work on the first morning of comparative coolness – 30 degrees Celsius – to find my colleagues telling me they were cold. I smiled and told them that temperatures drop below zero in Germany in winter, and often much below that. They looked at me in awe. There are many places in Bolivia where it gets as cold or even colder than that, and while travelling I had spent some freezing nights and days both in the Salt Desert and climbing a glacier near La Paz. But none of my colleagues had ever been to either of these regions. So I told the particular colleague and friend I was talking to that in Germany, there is snow in winter. He looked at me curiously and asked me what snow was like. And I found myself carefully thinking about ways to describe snow to someone who had never touched or seen it.

For me, snow had always been part of my life. My parents and grandparents pulled me around in a sledge before I could even walk, I started skiing when I was three and spent plenty of time in my childhood playing in the snow with my siblings and friends. Snow and all activities related to it have always been a highlight of my year, and when I was old enough I started quizzing our skiing instructor about the different types of snow. I spent a considerable amount of time reading up on avalanches, and one year our instructor even patiently took us to dig out a snow profile and categorise the different layers of snow within it. So, while I am certainly not an expert, snow is in no way a foreign concept to me and has been part of my life ever since I was born. Yet I struggled to define snow for my friend, who listened attentively to my attempts and occasionally interrupted with a question. When I next spoke to my family, I asked my mum to send me some of the chemical snow which, mixed with water, looks very similar to powder snow, and asked my dad, sister and brother for photos and videos of snow-making machines, piste-bashers and snow-mobiles, to supplement my explanations.

On my monthly free weekend, I went to the departmental capital to collect the chemical snow and download the array of photos and the video of a snow-making machine that my family had sent. When I showed my friend that video, he looked at me suspiciously and told me that he wasn’t falling for the joke, that clearly I was showing him a scene from a science fiction film. It took me a significant amount of time to convince him otherwise. It was the chemical snow, however, that fascinated him most. He carried it around the hospital the entire day and showed it to all the staff, and in particular to our mutual friend, the X-ray Technician. She looked at it cautiously and asked him what snow was. And he tried to explain, recycling what I had told him multiple times, looking at me questioningly every couple of seconds. I corrected what he got wrong and added explanations where he missed essential parts. In the end, our friend looked at him somewhat puzzled and asked me to explain again. Because, despite having listened to hours of explanations and having spent weeks looking at pictures, watching videos and quizzing me, my friend, who had never been outside the town’s particular climate zone, was unable to define snow.

In the weeks and months after coming back to Eu-rope, my family, friends, colleagues and even total strangers asked me about my experiences in Bolivia. I was happy to share many of them, and I talked about the hospital and my work there. But very quickly, I realised a crucial perspective was missing – that of my Bolivian colleagues, who had grown up in Bolivia, who had worked at the hospital and the town for years, and who continue to work there every day. While my experiences were very interesting for those I talked to (or so I hope), and my perspective was certainly a valid one, I reminded my audience that it was a very particular one – that of a then 21-year-old Emergency Medical Technician who went to work in a Bolivian hospital for half a year. Of course, I knew a considerable amount about the country, the region, the department, the town, the hospital. I had worked there almost every day and many nights for five months, and I had integrated very well. But this was still only part of the story. So I tried adding some of the perspectives of my Bolivian colleagues and friends. And I found myself thinking of that moment again. Memories of my friend trying to explain snow flooded back to me while speaking. Talking about my colleagues’ experiences felt like defining snow after having a somewhat limited insight into the notion. It is hard enough to try to comprehensively explain something that we have known and interacted with all our lives to someone who has not. It is impossible to do so with something we have only had relatively short contact with. Just as my friend could not fully define snow, neither could I fully define my colleagues’ perspectives.

With this came a second realisation: that the stories of those dedicating their lives to working or volunteering in their own country in social, humanitarian, development and peace-related fields are vastly unavailable in the Western world1. Narratives in the media, in NGO (non-governmental organisation) reports and in general discussions and publications often neglect the voices of those volunteers and staff members from the country in question. And – as many of those I talked to told me – there are no easily accessible, reliable ways of hearing the voices of people working in their own countries. While you can find many narratives by Western foreign aid workers in bookshops, there are none from their national counterparts. Although these accounts by foreign aid workers are often important and valid, they are just that – the stories of foreigners spending a relatively limited period of time in a country before (usually) moving on to the next project.

Particularly worrying is the trend of young ‘gap year’ and ‘voluntourism’ travellers writing autobiographies in their early twenties after spending anything between two weeks and two years volunteering in a remote corner of the earth. Foreign aid workers (including myself) and other volunteers can give valuable accounts of their experiences. But what they can’t do is give a full picture, if the stories of their national counterparts are still missing from the narrative. The same gap can be found in media reporting. Coming back from Bolivia, I was surprised at how little reporting there was on the political situation in the country, even at the height of a series of scandals surrounding the country’s political elite shortly after the national elections. The same became evident with the crises in South Sudan and Venezuela a short time later. The International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) started a campaign a couple of years ago called ‘Turning up the Volume on Silent Disasters’. Its aim was to raise awareness of the 91% of disasters worldwide that go unnoticed, unreported in TV and newspapers. And of course, there are an incredible number of dedicated people trying to alleviate the effects of such disasters in their home countries on a daily basis, yet often their stories go as unnoticed as the disasters themselves.

Speaking to my friends and former colleagues in Bolivia and discussing the problem with friends from around the world, a third realisation followed: not only was there no way to access the stories of these individuals in the Western world, but there was also no way for these individuals to tell their stories in the first place. This is when the idea of VOICE: Voices of Individuals Conveying Experiences, was born – a project to fill that void and to project the voices of those tirelessly working in their native country or region, to provide an alternative or supplement to dominant narratives. In February 2016, Project VOICE began, with just one writer from Bolivia. A little more than a year later, VOICE had a team of ten people, from six different countries, and was working with writers from all over the world. Their stories are very different – they convey a wide range of experiences and emotions – but they are all thought-provoking, honest, touching, inspiring and encouraging. None of the individuals telling their stories in this collection is a professional writer – some of them have never written a story in their lives. Yet, in their own words, each and every one of them gives powerful insights into their work, their dedication, their challenges, the importance and urgency of progress in their field, their hopes, wishes and goals, their beliefs, and their personal experiences. And as such, their collective voices are perfect definitions of snow.

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