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submit vignettes of NYS experiences: post them via email to National_Service [AT] compuserve.com (Don Eberley).
National youth service: VIGNETTESGermany The German national service called Zivildienst most nearly embodies the concept of a moral equivalent of war, as NYS is often characterized. The number of young men performing civilian national service as an alternative to military service at any one time increased from a few thousand in the 1960s to 130,000 in the mid-1990s. As a larger percentage of the public became familiar with the work of the COs, the public attitude shifted from negative -- viewing COs as deviants and draft-dodgers -- to positive. The account of a CO's parent helps to explain why this attitude has changed: I have a son who is doing his service in the sick ward of an old people's home.... I asked him how many deaths he actually had witnessed during his one-and-a-half years of civilian service. He told me that he could no longer count them; but, on an average, there were more than one every month. And you must bear in mind what it means to a young person who has just graduated from secondary school to take care of old people -- to wash and feed them, make their beds, care for them, help them up when they have fallen down and are bleeding, go for help when one of them has a stroke -- and then, at the end, watch the people, with whom he has just established contact, die. I ask myself the meaning of such arguments as the one that "military service is a greater strain," and I wonder what justification there actually is for making conscientious objectors do service for a period of time that is one-third longer than military service. [From Dr. Jurgen Kuhlmann's account of Zivildienst in Eberly, Donald and Michael Sherraden, eds. The Moral Equivalent of War? A Study of Non-Military Service in Nine Nations (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990). pp. 147-148.]
Argentina In the little town of Ramona, Santa Fe, Argentina, eighth-grade students discovered in the school laboratory that the water they were drinking was poisoned with arsenic. By the time they had arrived in twelfth grade they had ensured that the province provided their town with a drinking water plant, had the local administration build a new water system, and had organized (with the local hospital and two national universities) a health research and prevention plan to treat people with symptoms of arsenic poisoning. [From the account of service-learning in Argentina by Prof. Maria Nieves Tapia de Basilico, The Role of National Youth Service in Building Citizenship and Society, IANYS 5th Global conference Proceedings, (Carmel Institute for Social Studies, Israel), p. 41.] Israel Delegates to the biennial IANYS Conference in Jerusalem in 2000 visited the Weizmann Elementary School for Jews and Arabs in Jaffa, a suburb of Tel Aviv. They talked with several members of Shlomit, a service program that enlisted both Arab and Jewish young men and women for one to two years, about their work as teacher aides. Several delegates commented that if the Carmel Institute’s plan for a Civic Youth Service incorporating teams of Jews and Arabs, were ever given a chance to operate on a large scale, it would help to bring peace to that part of the world. Nigeria Following the Civil War of the lat 1960s, Nigeria introduced a National Youth Service Corps in 1973. University graduates serve for one year in a different part of the country from where they grew up. This is the summary ofan account given by Alhaji Sani Garba, a Corps member in the 1990s. After graduating from university, Garba received his call to NYS he was sad, as he viewed it as a year of suffering and hardship, and did not want to be deployed from the north to the southwest – it was a long way from his parents. Following his three-week-orientation, he was posted to a remote village with no transport, no electricity, no clean water, and poor sanitation. He had to stay and learn how to survive, because the assigned location could not be changed. Money was minimal, so he used his elementary school carpentry skills to build a bed, and make a mattress from the grasses. His demonstration of mattress-making inspired the whole village to make mattresses. As sanitation was poor, he worried he would get sick, so he built a pit latrine (there were no facilities prior to this). He also helped the villagers to dig mini-wells to find clean water. He said “The community learnt a lot from me and I learnt a lot from the community.... I went in a Northerner and came out a Nigerian.”[1]
Footnotes:[1] Alhaji Garba Sani, “Young People’s Experiences and Views,” National Youth Service into the 21st Century, op. cit., p. 44. Background information on NYS is included in the proceedings of its global conferences.
See in particular: For more details on IANYS, contact Donald J. Eberly, Honorary President of IANYS, email: National_Service [AT] compuserve.com |