Hi I’m Bethsarim Tromp, and I’m a “behind the scenes” remote RCA volunteer, right now I assist RCA from The Netherlands. While most RCA volunteers support the community directly, by being the arms and feet of the Red Cross Aruba team, what I do helps the internal organization, aka the heart, do their work, or as I had the pleasure to do in the summer of 2019, help pamper the hands and feet — literally.
Because I’m an introvert, usually large group activities are hard for me to join. I’m also usually not available, so for a long time I didn’t consider myself a volunteer at all. Especially seeing all the pictures of our bright beautiful volunteers doing their best work in the community, while I wasn’t there. Indra encouraged me to see what I do in a different light and I encourage others now to do your best in your situation with love. We all have a role to play and together it gets easier.
What I enjoy the most is being able to put my professional skills into use and taking a burden off the team so they can work more efficiently — and reading about all the great activities being done.
I’m a web developer and designer by trade, most of my experience is working with NGO and foundations. I really love the volunteer community and the organizations behind them because they get so much done together. In fact I was inspired to do web design right after Colegio many years ago because of a donation my then employer gave to a small foundation. They assigned me to deliver the work and ever since I felt a strong connection to making things easier for these dedicated organizations determined to make a change.
It’s really rewarding to know the people you support are out there stronger and more effective in their work. In this COVID season it has been amazing to see how RCA came together to help keep families fed, I know the team behind all the logistics has their hands full because it’s one of my jobs to review traffic and help when/if the technology has any hiccups.
So to all of the RCA team, thank you so much for being the heart, feet and arms in the midst of these challenging times taking care of the most vulnerable on Aruba.
We are so very proud of you!