Looking back
This document was primarily a collection of individual stories. They do not follow any other logic than the continuity of the life of the former volunteers. In some instances their pathways cross each other or are related to each other. The stories may be redundant but most of them include a few comments on a variety of themes and the authors draw some conclusions from their own individual experience.
For these reasons, it is worthwhile to undertake a cross reading of the stories to look at them in a more systematic way and to draw a few more general conclusions. In order to limit the length of this final chapter and to avoid repetitions, it will only include references to the contributors’ memories, so that the reader may need to refer back to some of the individual stories.
Following this approach, three themes are discussed in this chapter:
- First, we take a broad view of the origins and motivations of the volunteers and of their memories of their life in workcamps.
- In the next section, the comments made by the volunteers about SCI as an organization are brought together. With a few additional remarks, this leads to a discussion of some of the issues that were raised in the first chapter.
- The last section is a brief synthesis of the conclusions drawn by the contributors from their own individual experiences.