December 5 is the Day of the volunteer activities and, on this occasion, the coordinator of Tantaka-Tecnun, Paula Berroa, writes the following article.

"Just a few weeks ago an engineering student student showed me some pictures of his recent stay in Africa. He had spent a month helping to build a school in the Tanzanian town of Arusha, laying the first stones of a school that will be able to educate hundreds of children. He made a comment worthy of reflection: "I came back thinking about how unfair the world is. We have helped a little in the summer, we have had our picture taken, but we have returned to our comforts and they are still there without them." The student continued, "That's why I also try to do volunteer activities in Gipuzkoa, accompanying the people we have close to us, because they are the ones we are really going to be able to help the most in the long run deadline". He alluded to the movie Cadena de Favores, in which the idea is proposed that, if each of us financial aid helps three people, the next three may also do so, and thus, we would have the ability to begin to change the world.

Tantaka, the Solidarity Time Bank of the University of Navarra, was launched for this purpose. Its goal is none other than to encourage students, professors and researchers, the Philosophy with which this student returned from Africa: to learn to put on the glasses to see needs, starting with those closest to us. From Tantaka, whose motto is "we have time to change things", we encourage the university community to dedicate part of their time to lend a hand to social organizations in Gipuzkoa such as the Red Cross, Matia Foundation, Afagi (association de Familiares y Amigos de Personas con Alzheimer) or Hazi eta Ikasi, among others. The idea of this project is to 'help those who financial aid', doing what everyone knows or likes to do. I like to think that, although no one knows how to do everything, we all have something good to offer.

I think that the essence of Tantaka lies precisely in helping the volunteer to find a way to give the best of himself. The idea that the students of the theatre group at Tecnun had last year comes to mind. They had been rehearsing the play 'La Farsa' for months and came up with the idea of performing it in front of people with disabilities and elderly people living alone. They saw in their hobby a way to make an April morning more pleasant for these people by performing for them.

There are also teachers from the School who collaborate by tutoring children or adolescents with difficulties, because they see that the teaching is the tool with which they can lend a hand; university students who like sports and are willing to play a soccer game with inmates of the penitentiary center, even literature lovers who offer to recite poems to the elderly or sick people. So when a person is interested in doing volunteer activities and asks me what collaboration options are available, I tell him that there are as many options as he wants. The core topic is that each person knows how to recognize his or her own virtues and how to use them to improve the quality of life of others. The volunteer activities is a commitment that humanizes both the person who receives it and, perhaps even more so, the person who carries it out. Among other things, because it brings you closer to other realities that sometimes go unnoticed. In the specific case of the students of Tecnun, it also allows them to fill in the technical and human training they receive at the School of Engineers.

Tantaka 's raison d'être is precisely to make it easier for volunteers to collaborate by putting the needs of others on the table. I have found that many people had not collaborated before, for the simple reason that they did not know how or where to do it. Experience confirms that the main barrier that people have is our own lack of knowledge, but fortunately there are also many young people, and not so young, who as soon as they find out that there is a need in which they can get involved, they go without thinking twice to try to minimise the suffering of others. Fortunately, I see every day that there are still many young people capable of overcoming the selfie culture and living life in a different dimension, one that is truly worthwhile.