soulchaser

Volunteering is a fantastic way to learn new skills, gain knowledge, extend your trip, have completely different experiences and meet great people. Its is also a good way to be ripped off, pissed off, and generally disenchanted with humanity.

Finding volunteer work is easy all over the world. The difficulty is finding good volunteer work.

By "good" volunteer work I mean progrmas that are:

- Useful: providing a necessary service to the area
- Legitatmate: where is the money going?
- Affordable: paying to volunteer? strange but true
- Diverse: fancy weeding fields 8 hours a day?
- Considerate: your wealthare, education and enjoyment should be as important to the organisors as anything else.
- Interesting, educational, worthwhile etc etc etc

Basically, a lot of people spend A LOT of money to volunteer on projects. Some of these people aere rich kids sent out by parents eager to impress thier neighbours. These kids are usually only interested in the respect their work will grant them. Others actually believe they are benefitting an area, when really the project is completely unecessary and most of their money gets raked off by the organisors.

In my opinion, volunteering should NEVER cost more than $10/day, or $300 a month. Even that is rather a lot if you ask me.

Anyway, here is a continually updated list of useful webistes and files containing information I deem to be worthwhile:

volunteer_south_america.2.doc

Help Exchange

If you have volunteered somewhere that you would like to recommend, or have found a good website for finding sucj programs, please leave a comment or email me here