The term “NGO” (non-governmental organization) is used very often nowadays, but I don’t think that people think as much about the many different sizes and types of NGOs that exist, especially different countries. Volunteering with Beauty Night Society, a very unique NGO in terms of its organization and mission, helped me realise how diverse organizations out there could be (whether they are NGOs or not). It really made me start paying attention to different organization’s structures, motto, behaviour and so on. I enjoyed learning about how Beauty Night worked and about what the people who run it are like.
The attention I paid to Beauty Night Society’s structure as an organization mirrored the thinking we were encourage to do in our SOCI course, which included the study of social institutions such as banks, governments and private commercial companies. In this way, I suppose I could more easily understand what we were taught in class about such institutions (which can seem sometimes quite divorced from our reality as a young university student) because of what I experienced at Beauty Night.
A large component of several humanities courses (like CAP’s SOCI course, anthropology and so on) involves looking at and attempting to understand other groups of people in the world that can be very unlike the one we grew up in and are most familiar to. As a relatively well-off international student, I sometimes found it hard to picture the groups of people that we talked about in class, for a lot of what we studied was in the Canadian context and used Canadian case studies. Working at Beauty Night with other working class volunteers and being with the less privileged of Vancouverite society allowed me to better understand how they think and behave. This, especially in my first year at UBC, helped me to more quickly connect with course material in all my CAP courses. Writing the Trek reflections (3 to 6 short essays per year) were also very helpful in making me reflect on the social structures that create the circumstances and behaviours I saw at Beauty Night.
To future students of CAP Global Citizens: if it helps, think about what you want to get out of the sociology course when deciding whether you want to take Trek or not. I can’t say for sure what the students in discussion did, so I can’t give a good comparison. But personally, I can say that doing Trek at Beauty Night was definitely not so much of an academic experience, instead an eye-opening journey. It probably just helped me redefine what I understood “learning” to be. Be sure to look at the workload of discussions stated in the main page of this blog too to see which option suits best with what you want to get out of the course.
Doing manicures
Doing Henna art
Written by: Esther Ong