By Molly Welch
Volunteer support helps fuel our work at NetHope, and we’re lucky to have volunteer teams from our donor partners on many of our missions.
Dominik Hetzer, a Solutions Architect at Cisco, helped lead our May deployment of eight networks in refugee camps across in northern Greece. For Dominik, who is based in Zurich, the work was a far cry from his usual role focusing on technical sales, but also a welcome opportunity to support crisis relief: though his time is often spent interacting with customers, he’s also a member of the Cisco Disaster Incident Recovery Team (DIRT). When the team issued a call for volunteers for NetHope’s mission in Greece, he felt called to contribute.
“It’s a crisis that affects the daily lives of everyone in Europe,” he said. “It was obvious [to me] that I should help.”
Dominik said he was impressed by refugees’ goodwill: they consistently welcomed NetHope volunteers by offering fruit juice and helping hands in coordinating network installation. He was also struck by the normalcy of the people he met, saying, “[They were] farmers, network engineers, doctors. It really shows the scope of the conflict.”
Also notable to Dominik was how well the NetHope team - many of whom had not worked together previously - worked together throughout the mission. “We not only learned about the crisis, we learned a lot from each other,” he said.
In his spare time, you can find Dominik behind the lens of his camera - he’s an avid photographer - or trekking across Europe on his motorcycle.
This story is part of an ongoing series commemorating World Refugee Day.
Filed Under: Emergency Response, Faces of NetHope, Syria Refugee Crisis, World Refugee Day