Volunteer Medway

Our new columnist Zahra Barri investigates whether charity really can begin at home, or at least in Medway

Hello Medwaydians! I’m Zahra Barri, comedian, author and PhD student based in Rochester. Welcome to my Volunteer Medway column! They say that charity begins at home, but what if volunteering began in Medway?

Volunteer Medway was born out of my frustration at there being a plethora of online activism but very little information on how to actually act IRL. Now don’t get me wrong, social media does a fantastic job of creating awareness towards injustices, but when the average Instagram user is scrolling through such injustices on the johnny, a certain amount of gravitas is lost in cyber transit.

Zahra Barri at Open House Rochester

Furthermore, these completely newsworthy humanitarian issues can often be found (in the case of my algorithm) sandwiched between an entire Welsh family doing a meticulously choreographed dance to Rappers Delight on TikTok. The well-intended call to action tends to get lost somewhere between my ‘unique’ millennial digital blueprint, which oscillates somewhere around nineties nostalgia, dogs being kissed by their owners and skincare routines, all whilst trying to find the loo roll.

Even when I’m not doom scrolling on the loo and actually actively trying to save the world by showing support towards humanitarian (and donkey sanctuaries) causes, it never feels, well, quite like I am doing anything at all. Don’t get me wrong, I like how I feel like an absolute Princess Di every time I take the three seconds out of my day to sign change.org petitions. I also commend myself for considering it my absolute duty to post that I, too, ‘will never watch Masterchef again’ even though I never watched it in the first place (food shows just make me hungry). Additionally, I regularly like memes of Hollywood actresses’ Oscar speeches, saying empowering things like, ‘I just got my head down and worked’ before strutting back to sit beside their father, the patriarchal head of their acting dynasty family.

However, just using my finger to act? Whilst it did explain the saying that my mother shouted at me throughout my childhood (‘Come on, get your finger out!’), it felt rather futile. I began to wonder what would happen if I used more than my finger. I pondered the increased efficacy of using my whole entire body. For it wasn’t just the whole using my digit on the digital (thank you, Creative Writing MA), but I became quite overwhelmed by the inertia, the frenzy, the panic, the sheer grand scale, the universality of completely worthy causes that we needed to have all our fingers on the pulse on at all times. Social media has made global issues seem local, so whilst they raise awareness, it makes us feel somewhat powerless because, in reality, we simply cannot physically get there.

But then I began to think about how I got through my GCSEs. I remembered the BBC Bitesize courses that broke down modules into manageable and accessible chunks, and I began to apply this theory to charity and humanitarianism. The key, I began to see, was focusing on the smaller issues at first. Don’t worry about how to solve an algebraic equation that has brackets and square roots, simply focus on the value of ‘x’. In this case, it was about merely placing value on where your ‘x’ marks the spot. The causes closer to home are smaller and, both figuratively and literally, more approachable. They were not across countries and continents that could only be accessed through the digital realm. Instead, causes on your doorstep can be accessed via the physical nomadic realm (by this, I mean walking/public transport). The only downside I could see was that you couldn’t do any of it on the loo.