The Unexpected Gift of Volunteering

Lessons from the World Cup and My Father’s Dream

Illustration note: The hero image for this article is imaginary and created for storytelling purposes. No actual FIFA Volunteer photos are shown. Real volunteer photos will be shared after July 19, 2026, following volunteer guidelines.

Father’s Day landed on me sideways this year. I wasn’t at home. I wasn’t at a barbecue or staring at a card I didn’t know how to sign anymore. I was standing in a sea of flags and face paint in Dallas, wearing a volunteer credential around my neck, pointing tired strangers toward the nearest exit. And somewhere between one set of directions and the next, it hit me — quietly, the way these things tend to — that my father would have loved every single second of this.

I was originally scheduled to volunteer on Father’s Day, but I was able to give my Father’s Day shift to someone else. So today, instead of being in the middle of the crowd, I am spending a calm day at home, letting the whole experience settle in a quieter way.

In Brazil, where I’m from, Father’s Day comes later in the year, so the date on the American calendar didn’t mean much to me on paper. But my body didn’t check the calendar. It just felt him. Football was always his language, his religion, his one unembarrassed joy. He never got to see a World Cup in person. Not once, in his whole life. And there I was, years after he passed, standing inside one of the biggest sporting events on earth, doing something he never got the chance to do.

Life has a strange way of finishing sentences we didn’t know we’d left open. I didn’t plan this. I didn’t volunteer at the FIFA World Cup because I was chasing some grand, poetic moment about my Dad. I signed up because I wanted to be useful, because I love what happens when the whole world shows up in one place at the same time. The meaning found me later, in the middle of an ordinary shift, the way meaning usually does.

Why I Chose to Volunteer

If I’m honest, the decision wasn’t dramatic. I wanted to give back. I love international events, the chaos of different languages overlapping in one line, the strange comfort of being surrounded by people who are all excited about the same thing for completely different reasons. I wanted to be part of something bigger than my own daily routine of inbox and errands and the small, manageable life most of us build for ourselves.

And yes, somewhere underneath all of that was my Father’s love of the game. I didn’t lead with it when I signed up. I didn’t write it on the application as my motivation. But it was there, the way certain things from childhood are always there, just below the surface, waiting for the right moment to surface again.

I went in with no real expectations. No vision board, no specific outcome I was hoping to walk away with. Just a willingness to help wherever they put me, doing whatever small, unglamorous task the day required. That turned out to be exactly the right way to walk into it.

The Hidden Joy of Service

Most people think volunteering is about giving something away. Your time, your energy, your Saturday. And it is that. But what caught me off guard was how much I received in return, almost immediately, without asking for any of it.

New friendships formed in the strangest pockets of downtime — standing in the heat with another volunteer, both of us a little sunburned, swapping stories about why we signed up. New perspective on how much effort goes into something that, from the outside, looks effortless. A new appreciation for plain, uncomplicated kindness — the kind that doesn’t ask to be noticed.

I found purpose in the smallest interactions imaginable. Not in some sweeping, cinematic sense. In the daily accumulation of tiny moments where someone needed something and I happened to be the person standing there who could help. In that sense, volunteering became a lived version of spiritual meditation: attention, presence, and meaning meeting in ordinary life.

Small Moments That Matter

Helping Visitors Find Their Way

So much of the job was just this: a person holding a ticket, looking lost, looking a little embarrassed about looking lost. I’d point them toward the right gate, explain which way the line actually moved, untangle whatever small confusion had built up in their head on the way there. None of it was complicated. All of it felt, in the moment, surprisingly important.

Using My Imperfect Spanish

My Spanish is not good. I want to be clear about that. It’s patchy, accented, occasionally held together with hand gestures and hope. But again and again, I watched something interesting happen — visitors from Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries would light up not because I spoke their language well, but because I tried at all. Effort, it turns out, often matters more than precision. A clumsy sentence offered warmly does more than a perfect one offered with indifference.

Helping People End a Long Day

By the time the match ended, people were exhausted in that specific way that comes from joy and heat and adrenaline all at once. I spent a lot of those final hours just pointing tired families toward the right exit, helping someone figure out where their rideshare was supposed to meet them, offering a direction and a small dose of reassurance to people who just wanted to sit down somewhere, anywhere, that wasn’t still standing in line.

Connecting Through Shared Experience

The conversations stayed with me more than I expected. Fans from entirely different corners of the world, talking about the same match, the same team, the same nervous hope in their chest before kickoff. Sports have this strange, almost magical ability to erase the distance between people who would otherwise have nothing in common. For a few hours, none of the usual differences mattered. We were all just people who cared, intensely, about the same small ball.

Presence Is a Form of Service

A lot of the visitors I met weren’t looking for a complicated solution. They were stressed, or confused, or simply overwhelmed by the scale of everything around them. And most of the time, what actually helped wasn’t a perfect answer. It was someone calm. Someone present. A smile instead of a sigh. A clear direction instead of a shrug. It reminded me how useful simple grounding exercises can be when the world feels too loud.

I started to notice that service, at its core, often begins with attention — just actually seeing the person in front of you, rather than rushing past them toward the next task on the list. That’s a smaller skill than I expected it to be, and also a much rarer one. That same attention is also what helps us stay calm and focused at work, especially when many people need us at once.

The World Comes to You

One of the strangest gifts of volunteering at something this size is that you don’t have to travel the world to meet it. The world simply arrives, all at once, wearing different jerseys and speaking different languages and carrying flags I didn’t recognize until someone explained them to me.

And underneath all those differences, the same handful of things kept showing up, over and over, in every accent and every language. People wanted to belong somewhere, even briefly. They wanted joy, and a place to celebrate it. They wanted connection, and to feel genuinely welcome in a country that wasn’t theirs. It turns out that no matter where someone is from, the wanting looks remarkably similar.

My Father’s Dream

I keep circling back to him. I can’t help it. My Dad loved football the way some people love a faith — fully, uncritically, without needing it to make sense to anyone else. I remember watching matches with him as a kid, the way his whole posture would change the moment the game started. The shouting at the television that meant nothing and everything. The pure, unguarded excitement every four years when a new World Cup arrived, like a holiday only he seemed to fully understand the importance of.

He never got to go. Not once. Tickets, money, timing, life — it never lined up for him, and eventually there wasn’t any time left for it to line up. So when I stood inside that stadium (actually Fan Fest Dallas) in Dallas, lanyard around my neck, helping strangers find their seats, I thought about him more than I expected to. I thought about how strange it is that I was the one standing there, in a role he never imagined for either of us, doing something that felt, somehow, like it belonged to him too.

I wasn’t just helping visitors find their gate. I was carrying a small, unplanned piece of his dream forward — not in the way either of us would have imagined, not as a fan in the stands cheering for a team, but close enough. Close enough that it mattered. Close enough that I had to step away for a minute, just to feel it properly.

What Volunteering Gives Back

Patience came first, and came almost without my noticing. Helping people one at a time, slowly, repeatedly, teaches you something about pacing yourself that no amount of reading about patience ever quite manages.

Gratitude followed close behind — a real appreciation for the kind of opportunity most of us walk past without registering. Perspective, too, on how fortunate it is to simply be present for something this big, in any capacity at all. Gratitude can begin quietly, like a morning mindfulness anchor, and then expand into the rest of the day.

And then connection. Bridges built quickly and without effort between total strangers, simply because we happened to be standing in the same place at the same time, caring about the same thing. Purpose, finally — quiet, undramatic, found in service rather than declared in advance.

Lessons Beyond the World Cup

It would be easy to file this whole experience away as a once-in-a-lifetime thing, something that only happens at the scale of a World Cup. But that misses the point entirely. Volunteering doesn’t need a stadium (actually Fan Fest Dallas). Opportunities to help exist in every community, every week, often without any of the spectacle. It can begin with a calm morning routine, a small act of patience, or one generous decision.

Small acts of service create ripple effects that are easy to underestimate. Helping one person, even briefly, can change the shape of their entire day — and you rarely get to see how far that ripple actually travels. The impact is mostly invisible. That doesn’t make it any less real. These small moments are one reason I believe in the healing power of meditation as a daily practice of returning to what matters.

Closing Reflection

We almost never know, in the moment, which of our small gestures someone will end up remembering.

A smile.

A kind word.

Directions offered to someone who was clearly lost and a little embarrassed about it.

A conversation held together in a language we barely speak.

A few minutes of patience that cost us nothing and meant, apparently, quite a lot.

Sometimes helping another person find their way helps us find our own.

And sometimes, without ever planning it, without any grand intention behind it, we end up honoring the people we’ve lost by quietly becoming the kind of person they always hoped we’d be.

My Father never made it to a World Cup. But for a few weeks this summer, in a small, sideways, unexpected way, I think I brought him along anyway.

And on this Father’s Day, I would also like to recognize the single Mothers, Widowed Mothers, Grandparents, Relatives, and Caregivers who stepped forward when life asked them to fill more than one role. Your love, sacrifice, patience, and strength have helped shape countless lives. Thank you for everything you do.

Happy Father’s Day. 💙⚽

Volunteer registration for LA 2028 is scheduled to open July 14. Have you ever volunteered for an event, organization, or cause that changed you in unexpected ways? I’d love to hear about it — share your experience in the comments.