“Sharing Skills and Changing Lives,” said Julie to me, “is not as easy as it sounds.”

Julie was a 32 year-old Canadian midwife working in Sri Lanka. She was talking to me about the tagline of VSO, an international development organization that had employed me as one of its national program officers. At that time, I had returned to Sri Lanka from the U. K. only recently. I found it easy to identify with Julie.

Every year VSO places international volunteers who possess skills that are scarce in fields such as mental health, good governance and disability which the organization identifies as its development-goal areas in the most disadvantaged countries around the world. During a placement that averages two years, volunteers attempt to strengthen local organizations by sharing their knowledge with employees. The request for the volunteer is made by the organization. The program officers assess the organization’s need and match volunteers to the request. Julie was one of my volunteers. I was directly linked to her placement and her progress.

I posted Julie on a sprawling plantation settlement on a mountain range eight hours away from Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka. During the last three hours of our journey to her plantation bungalow we travelled on narrow dirt roads that had been cut into the mountain surfaces. All around us we saw emerald tea plantations and in the far distance beyond the valleys, the southern plains we had travelled from shimmered in the morning sun.

In the 19th century the British had cleared virgin forests of this region and planted one of the most lucrative crops at the time; tea. When they found that the locals did not want to work on the tea plantations, they brought laborers from South India. Until recently this group of estate Tamil people has had little access to their rights such as a minimum wage or claims to citizenship.

When I met the managers of the tea plantation companies they told me they wanted change. Most of the plantation companies had made substantial efforts to improve housing facilities and provide access to health and primary education for their employees. This is a labor intensive industry. Every morning women climb the mountain face picking out two leaves and a bud from tea plants. The women bear the real burden of labor on a tea plantation.

My first visit to Julie’s plantation came two months after I had taken her there. I had left behind a young, enthusiastic and highly skilled woman. The plantation women laughed and giggled the moment she greeted them in her wavering tamil. The children and the dogs flocked around her. When I went back Julie had changed, had become subdued. She was having issues with her employer. She told me that the managers only promised to implement her suggestions. She wanted to work with the local nurse at the plantation health unit and train her in more up-to-date nursing care procedures, but the managers had not given her the time to do so. Julie also expressed doubts that the plantation women really wanted the sterilization they opted for after the birth of their second child.

I acted as an intermediary between Julie and the superintendents of the estate. They seemed surprised and upset that Julie could not appreciate the efforts they had made to allow her to work on the plantation.

When I returned 4 months later Julie displayed obvious signs of despair. She had doubts about the impact of her work. She had still not met the local nurse. She complained that the doctor did not administer adequate levels of anesthetic to the women during the sterilization procedure. She was angry. She said that the administrators of the plantations manipulated the women’s choice to be sterilized by giving them a financial bonus for the decision. “This is not right. This is very unethical,” she said over and over again, shaking her head.