Meet Dylan!
January 26, 2018
It was just another typical sunny day in Siem Reap: hot, humid and tranquil. But today in ICF, the relaxing leisurely atmosphere was replaced by conviviality and invigoration of the wheelchair basketball team in Siem Reap and Battambang. All these were captured veraciously in Dylan’s photo.
Dylan Crawford is an undergraduate student in Australia, majoring in photography and journalism. He approached Soulcial Trust months ago in a bid to pursue his final-year student project. ‘I never want to work a job where I was sitting at the desk… in a building… that kind of thing is very unfulfilling. It doesn’t feel like you are trying to help anyone. It doesn’t feel like you are helping yourselves. Not my life.’ he said. Owing to this altruistic vision of a better world, Dylan travels to Cambodia and seeks to tell the untold stories of people with disability through photography.
Today, he joined the sports team with disability to learn about wheelchair basketball. ‘Never have I been in Cambodia watching people in wheelchairs playing basketball. It’s different.’ Dylan noted. The training session was an eye-opening experience for Dylan. He took photos during the training, capturing the sinews of the wheelchair basketball sports team. He wishes to pursue a higher degree and thereby forays into the field of development since he would love to teach people what he knows. ‘I would like to do this kind of stuff [the XLability project implemented by Soulcial Trust] forever, helping out these NGOs’.
Volunteering takes different forms and we believe that our organisation can find a place where you can utilise your skillsets to do something much bigger. Not only is volunteering ‘doing good’, but, more importantly, it is also a transformative act to the self, such as the experience of Dylan who discovered more about disability and prepares to tell the story of the players through photos in his country.
Soulcial Trust’s online platform connects volunteers with grassroots NGOs and social enterprises. If you are interested in volunteering outside of your home country and make your visit more meaningful, not to mention impactful, join now at www.soulcialtravel.com.