Venezuelan refugee Elvia Peñaranda’s work with Refugee UN Volunteers allows her to serve her community as she supports her family. © UNHCR/Fernando Hernández Parada
UNHCR has over 17,000 personnel. Meet Elvia Peñaranda, a Venezuelan UN Refugee Volunteer who draws on her own experiences to assist Venezuelans refugees and migrants in Colombia.
By Fernando Hernández Parada in Cúcuta, Colombia
Name: Elvia Eduviges Peñaranda, 38, from Caracas, Venezuela.
Job title: A nurse by training, Elvia worked as an assistant in a gynaecological clinic in her native Venezuela. She is currently a Local Liaison Promoter with the Refugee UN Volunteer programme in her host city of Cúcuta, on Colombia’s eastern border with Venezuela.
UN Volunteers is a pool of over 250,000 talented and qualified people from around the world who are deployed to shore up the work of UN agencies the world over. A joint initiative between UN Volunteers and UNHCR, the new Refugee UN Volunteer programme gives displaced people the opportunity to build on their skills while providing much-needed humanitarian assistance. UN Volunteers receive allowances, which permit those selected to take part in the programme to support themselves and their families.
How did you become a Refugee UN Volunteer?
My story starts back in Venezuela, where I was born and where I studied to become a certified nurse. Because of the situation of the country, I couldn’t ever find a job in my field. I eventually found work as an assistant in a gynaecological clinic, but the situation in Venezuela kept getting worse and worse, to the point where my mother, who has diabetes, couldn’t get the medicines she needed. Because of the risks in Venezuela, I was also worried about the future of my two daughters, who were 5 and 10 at the time. By the time we left Venezuela, we were down to eating only sardines with yucca, or ground corn, and I weighed 42 kilos.
Before we left, I had a job offer to work as a nanny in Colombia, but when we got here, the job had been given to someone else. It was a real setback, and I had no choice but to do any kind of work I could find. I worked as a housecleaner, I worked in a beauty salon and I worked as a street vender, selling homemade empanadas and coffee. I would get up at 3 a.m. to make the empanadas and by 6 a.m. I would be out the door, pounding the pavement. There were many days where I earned just barely enough to buy food for the day – a kilo of rice, a bit of meat, a few tomatoes and onions and bananas.
After about a year of that, by chance someone invited me to attend a workshop at a church that was aimed at giving Venezuelan refugees and migrants new skills. I went and really liked it and I started to attend all the workshops they held. They led to contacts with lots of humanitarian groups and eventually I started volunteering as a Liaison Promoter, working in the field with the Venezuelan community. Eventually, a UNHCR staff person who saw me working in these communities told me, “Why don’t you apply for a position as a Refugee UN Volunteer? You should definitely apply!”
