Kanzy Kassem, in her last year at the International Secondary School of Ferney-Voltaire, has done a one-week observation internship at Humanium.
“Humanium has been an experience which has had a great impact on my adolescence; on the one hand because it was my first experience of the professional world, and on the other hand because it allowed me to understand what it meant to be part of an NGO.
This organisation has helped me grow up and understand things which I had little knowledge of before. The experience has made me more aware of the inequalities concerning children’s rights. Thanks to these collaborations hope and optimism have been created side by side.
I consider myself lucky, because during my placement I was never bored. In general, when you are 16 years old, work placements involve doing very little or the same things over and over again. But for me, this wasn’t the case. I was involved in many different and interesting things. The people at the NGO made sure that I was never bored and that made it very enjoyable and rewarding. I was involved with the shop, the processing of clients and contracts, signing up new volunteers, enlisting the NGO in a sponsorship project and working with data bases. I felt fully integrated when working on the organisation’s projects.
This placement only lasted 5 days but it has changed my point of view on lots of things. Before I had other interests, but now I envisage myself working in the humanitarian sector in the future. This is because it is one of the few sectors which allows you to help and improve the world. Humanium may be a small organisation, but the joyous moments and laughter that I shared with this team will stay in my memory forever.
Furthermore, thanks to Shaya, I have started to appreciate dogs, which I was scared of before. The Humanium team is attentive and generous. They have transformed my weak and strong points, taught me and explained to me things I did not previously understand. At the start I was scared to go into ‘the big wide world’ but thankfully everything went well in the end!
Thank you to Olivier, Olivia, Fanny and Morgane, with whom I exchanged my first emails, as they were all a pleasure to work with.”
