Growing up in Toronto, one of the most multicultural cities in the world, Elizabeth Siebenmann is used to being exposed to a diversity of cultures and traditions. Thus, when she arrived in Sarajevo in October 2009 to take over a position of the UNV Programme Officer in BiH, she felt almost at home.

“Day-to-day life in Sarajevo, for an international, is not that complicated. The city has pretty much what you have in Canada, in any big city. Though, working and living in Sarajevo, you are living in a bubble because the rest of the country is not facing the same realities. You go just half an hour outside of Sarajevo, and you are in a small village that lacks many of the things we take for granted. The contrast is huge,” Elizabeth explains as she has just returned from a field visit to a youth centre in an isolated community in eastern part of BiH.

A Canadian citizen, Elizabeth has a long working experience with non-profit and government sector. After completing a BA degree in Sociology and Gender Studies, like many young people, she too faced a dilemma about her future professional directions. That is why she decided to volunteer hoping this would expose her to the sort of things she might want to pursue professionally.

Elizabeth first volunteered with a local hospital, moving later to work with the Save the Children Canada and the Canadian Cancer Society where she helped with fundraising, donor relations and volunteer support programmes. She eventually took over a position in the YMCA Canada, a charitable organization dedicated to community development, where she spent six years and nurtured her passion to work in the field of international development.

“I decided I needed to go back to further my education so I enrolled in a one-year postgraduate programme in international project management which focused very heavily on understanding and getting practical experience in project design, proposal writing, and operating development and humanitarian projects oversees, and then as a part of this project there was a requirement to complete an oversees placement.” Concurrent with the programme, Elizabeth was engaged with several volunteer-based organizations, including the Medicins Sans Frontiers. She was now ready to realize her dreams and soon enough, she got a chance to do so after being offered a position with the United Nations Volunteers as the Programme Officer in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

With a long track of volunteering experience and seeing on numerous occasions a real impact volunteers make in both their local communities and abroad, Elizabeth was happy to seize an opportunity to do something professionally meaningful. “I really enjoy the role I am doing. It gives me an opportunity to do a mixture of things, and I never do the same thing day after day. Even in one day I could be juggling four, five, six different things requiring different skills,” she adds.

Since she joined, the UNV programme in BiH has gradually expanded counting now close to 40 international and national UN Volunteers working with other UN agencies and local partners towards achievement of the Millennium Development Goals. These professionals are involved in projects targeting some of the key problems in BiH, such as the youth employment and environment.

“I am very, very happy with my team. We now have close to 40 people who are very dedicated, full of enthusiasm, have wide range of skills and experience that they bring to whatever role they are doing,” says  Elizabeth.

After we finish our talk, Elizabeth goes back to work to look into a problem that has just appeared. Stress does not appear to get to her – a curious sociologist, she looks at things to try to identify the underlying assumptions, and determine if there is another more constructive perspective to apply in the situation. There. Problem solved.