Report on the volunteer work carried out by Katarina Putnik during 2004

I have been an intern at WRI from 19th of January to 25th February 2004. I have learnt, observed and experienced many new and valuable things while being there and would like to share them with the others.

Duties

I have had access to many documents and publications of WRI as well as to Roberta's personal file on projects related to Dealing with the past, which is of a lot of interest to me, so I have spent a large amount of time reading various reports and books, enlarging my knowledge on the topic. I also got to see what Roberta and WRI do related to the field of Dealing with the past in practical terms, what projects she has been involved with and how the organization runs on a daily basis.
I have been in charge of co-coordinating and setting up Roberta's photo exhibition 'Chile"…together with Miriam from the gallery at St. Mary's crypt.
I took part in WRI activities, such as observing the court cases and observing the meetings between the staff members. The atmosphere in the organization is very friendly and informal and I feel it is easy to feel part of it because everyone working there is very friendly and approachable.
I created a computer database with all the relevant photos from Roberta's latest trip to Sri Lanka that included 20 films of women's personal photos related to Dealing with the past. The photos were scanned, grouped according to name of the person to whom they belong and had general themes in the title, for easier retrieval. Once this was completed I was involved with sorting them in the photo album, labeling them and arranging them in order.
WRI gave me the opportunity to meet and interact with people from various other peace organizations, which to me was very valuable. It broadened my horizons to see what variety of work they are involved in.
I have written an article for the Broken Rifle newsletter titled 'Dealing with the past in Serbia, which was published in March 2004, No. 60, p.3.
Thanks to WRI, I have attended a workshop on Gender and conflict transformation workshop, organised by Committee for Conflict Transformation Support workshop
Every Thursday I attended workshops at St. Ethelburga's Centre for Reconciliation and Peace and also presented a paper titled 'Importance of dealing with the past in Serbia and the role of religion in this process'

Impressions

One of the things that struck me at the organisation is the fact that there are so few employees and few resources, yet there is so much work they do, being involved in various activities, projects, seminars and so on. I would also like to stress the point that there is a lot of work done that the volunteer cannot really help with, such as writing the reports after the trips and so on, so the volunteer needs to be able to work independently and find areas and topics to work on while there is no other relevant office work that can be helped with.

I would like to thank everyone in the office for their hospitality, in particular to Roberta, who organised the logistics of my stay, co-ordinated my work, provided valuable feedback on queries that I had and made me feel at home during my stay, for which I am tremendously grateful.

I feel I have learnt a lot from this internship, I saw what peace organisations are, how they work and how they function on day-to-day basis.