Finally, we are reaching our destination, after nearly 700 kilometers on a bumpy road. The jeep approaches a small town laid in the midst of the endless steppe. There we meet E., an elected representative from a Citizens’ Representative Hural, which is the name for local self-governing bodies in Mongolia.

Nicaragua suffered a terrible civil war in the 1980s. The city where I was born was one of the main centres of the conflict. Consequently, I grew up amidst political instability and economic hardship. Witnessing the vast unmet needs of our population inspired me to volunteer for several projects committed to improving health and sanitation in remote communities of Nicaragua.

Since August 2017, close to 700,000 Rohingya refugees have arrived in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, creating the world’s largest refugee camp in an area that was before a forest on the border with Myanmar. According to UNFPA, more than half of the new arrivals are women and girls. To respond to the sharp increase in pregnant women, new mothers and newborns in need of care, five UN Volunteers are now serving with UNFPA in Bangladesh. 

This project is particularly important as although Sri Lanka has ended a 30-year civil war, there remains unresolved issues of psychological trauma, sexual violence and misunderstanding between different ethnicities. The project is part of the support provided by the UN in Sri Lanka towards the government's 'Peacebuilding Priority Plan (PPP) which serves as the "framework for a coordinated, government, UN, and other stakeholders response to secure lasting peace in Sri Lanka".

  *** Xinzhuang is in Changping District of Beijing. Located at the foot of the Yanshan Mountains, this area has about 2,000 residents, 60% of whom are non-locals. The “newcomers” settle here to take their children to a local school. The rest of the population are mostly farmers, as the village is one of the main suppliers of strawberries to Beijing.  Xinzhuang village is a typical rural community with basic public services for waste and sanitation. But things changed after an incident in the village.

It was during my university years in the United States that I became more aware of the injustice in the world, by meeting students who had lived in poverty or experienced civil wars as a child, and studying about conflicts happening in different regions. Working to help people became my goal. A few years later, I was at the United Nations headquarters explaining and promoting its work to visitors from around the world as Tour Guide. By the time I had joined the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, I was eager to go to the field to work directly with the people.

It’s Thursday morning and I have landed in Savannakhet in the south of Laos, on a monitoring mission for our project.The project I work for, SAFE Ecosystems project, targets the reforestation of 1,111 hectares of land, contributing to Lao PDR's target to achieve 70 per cent forest cover by 2020.

Ms Valerie Crab, Programme Specialist and Innovation Lead, has been working with two national UN Youth Volunteers and one national UN Volunteer in the twenties on innovation, such as the U-Report Indonesia, a polling system that uses social media to help deliver youth opinions to policymakers. “I think that UN Volunteers should be recruited to bring an added value to a programme that otherwise we wouldn’t have access to,” she says. On the value of having a UN Youth Volunteers in her team, she describes,

Some 103 UN Volunteers served with UNAIDS in 38 countries over the past 10 years.  Supporting the mandate of UNAIDS, they have been working towards stopping new HIV infections, ensuring that everyone living with HIV has access to treatment, protecting and promoting human rights and producing data for decision-making. 

As an international UN Volunteer specialized in communication, Catalin was one of the first people to be sent to Cox’s Bazar to document the response of WHO Bangladesh. “Prior to the escalation of this crisis, there were already established partnerships between WHO, the government and other health partners. With the massive influx of people from Myanmar, strategies had to be adapted to this critical situation,” explains Catalin.