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Things to Consider before your volunteer trip and gap year

July 9, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Before you leave home for your vacation or your trip to help and change humanity. Here are things you should look into to make sure you are not caught unawares. For inexperienced travelers these are very important and should not be taken lightly. As an experienced traveler you know some of these tips but also you need to be reminded of the basics.

    How much time do you have available to volunteer or travel?

Many volunteers don’t plan their time well before they leave for their trip. Some plan too little time and feel like they are not effective. Or feel like their impact was not felt like it should have. Some volunteers are people who are working and they use their vacation period to go. Depending on your employer and how much time they give you. You should plan your time well so that you can leave as soon as you can and be back early also. So that you will not be burnt out by the time you are going to work. Also the vacation should be too short for you to leave an impact. Gap year travelers are the lucky ones here as they don’t have a time limit. And they are able to start and finish a project.

    What kind of work do you want to do?

Many companies out there which offer great programs and projects for volunteers.  The packages available are good too but the programs are mainly generalized for the public. There are a list and a whole number of programs available but if you are to decide to something you want to make sure you like what you are going to do and be good at it. The work you pick to do should be something you like to do and it should play to your strengths. For example if you like to play with kids then orphanage work would be good for you. Also if you are used to teaching your peers, then teaching would come naturally for you.

    What kind of work would you prefer to avoid?

Like the previous paragraph this is very important. You don’t want to feel burdened or overworked in your vacation. Also sometimes when you choose to be involve in some program there are duties that you would like to avoid. For example if you work in an orphanage and they ask you to wash clothes and you are not comfortable with that. You should talk to the organization that you are using to make sure you avoid things you are not comfortable with. If the work you choose has certain areas you are not ok with, explain to them that you can’t do it most companies will work with you and will change to suit your preferences.

    What skills and talents can you bring to the group?

One of the hardest questions to answer is what are your talents? Most of us don’t know what we are good at. There are few of us who are lucky to know our talents early. If you are in the first group, then use a series of guided questions to help you find the things you can bring to the volunteer program. Look for things you like to do. For example if you love playing video games it doesn’t mean you can’t help with your skills. This means you could come up with games that people enjoy like monopoly, chess or scrabble.

    What locations are you most interested in?

Many organizations offer a multitude of locations. The problem comes when you are overwhelmed with the choices and you are not sure where to go. In some they give you the option of which continent to apply your volunteer trip or where to start your gap year. In some they you can choose whether you want to be in the cities or in the rural areas. You should look at your options and find the ones which are more appropriate for you. For example if you choose to go and live in the rural areas in a third world country. You will find the conditions there to be basic, no running water or electricity.

Zablon Mukuba is the Director of Volunteer Capital Centre the leading provider of quality and affordable volunteer abroad work programs and opportunities in third world countries. Leave a finger print on a life. For more information visit Volunteer Capital Centre.

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Saving money tips while abroad

June 25, 2012 by 1 Comment

Spending money wisely is one of the biggest things we all worry about. We are told not to spend more money than we earn. If you earn $ 2,000 a month you shouldn’t be spending $ 2,500 during that month. But it is easier said than done, we might pass by a shop and start buying things on impulse e.g. shoes (for ladies) and other clothing. Spending money is tricky especially if you want to make every dollar or pound or Euro to work for you. Using money is even harder if you are in another country during your holiday, volunteer/ intern abroad trip, gap year. During this period you won’t be getting extra income and the one you get won’t be able to meet your needs. To avoid calling home to ask for money to be sent to you or using too much of your credit card, money should be spent wisely. Spending money wisely will reduce the credit card debt you will incur when you are abroad. It’s harder saving money while abroad because you don’t know where to get the best deals and the locals see you as a cash cow to be taken advantage of. Here are tips that will help you to save money and make the most of your volunteer/ intern abroad and gap years:

Before you leave

Make the most of your money before you leave, book in advance in order to get the best flight ticket. Buying your airline ticket early allows you to get the best deals to your volunteer/ intern destination.  Paying for the ticket in advance allows you to save a few hundred dollars or Euros. Booking for hotels and hostel in advance helps in saving money. As in some you might be able to take advantage of the low rates during the off season.  Research for the best deals that are available from the internet. Travel insurance is very important and should be taken seriously. If you are to buy it from a travel agent they will sell you policies which are expensive. Or they will send you to firms which are not at cost. Shop around and look for the most cost effective plan for yourself. That is if you will be travelling once or you will travelling in many times during the year. With different options you will be able to choose wisely which the best is for you.

Bank accounts

Using credit cards overseas is very useful and effective. But there are many hidden costs and charges that they don’t tell you when you are applying for them. First of is the transaction fees they charge are different than what they charge you while you are at home. Then secondly there are currency conversion rates which in some banks are about 2 or 3 %. Use debit cards as opposed to credit cards while you are abroad. This is because credit cards start charging you interest from the time you have withdrawn cash. Due to these costs, when you use the ATMs, withdraw large amounts and do it once in a while.  If you are going to stay in the host country for a period of 6 to 12 months it’s advisable to open a local bank account. Opening a local bank account is better as you won’t have to worry about ATM fees, Currency conversion and huge interest rates. After your volunteer / intern abroad program is over, you can withdraw all your cash and change it back to your currency at the banks.

Communication Costs

When you arrive at your host country, buy a cheap local phone which will help you communicate with your friends and family. Due to the advent of the internet we can cut down our communication costs drastically. Facebook makes it easy to send messages either through wall profiles or directly at their inboxes.  With this you can save money rather than sending direct text messages or sms. Skype has an extensive network all over the world. With Skype you can make free online calls from Skype to Skype. Using other companies like Yahoo, MSN messenger also provides free calls on their services. These services drastically reduce your communication costs when you want to communicate with friends and family.

Group travelling

You will be able to get group discounts if you travel as a group. You can start saving money as soon as you leave your home country. Some airlines offer group discounts and you will get better rates rather than travelling alone. Also hotels and hostels offer group discounts. Going with a group of friends enables all of you to get more value for your money. Apart from it being more fun it will also be cheaper.

Locals

The natives of the country are a huge resource of information. Although some might use your for cash, there are those who are good and will advice you on the best places where you will get value for your money. They will take you to the cheaper shops, restaurants and hotels. In some case you will be able to save money if you stay with them. The local people as your friends will help you navigate the cities and give you the best budget deals. Use public transport to move around, like buses and trains as opposed to using taxis and chattered cars.

Tourist areas

Tourist areas are known to be the most expensive areas. You should avoid such areas as they will reduce your budget drastically. The prices for everything in these areas are normally inflated. Buying goods and services in these areas is not a good idea as you won’t be able to sustain your stay. Exchanging money at the airports is a bad idea as the exchange rates there are unfavorable to you.

Zablon Mukuba is the director of Volunteer capital Centre, leading provider of quality and affordable volunteer abroad opportunities in third world countries. We give you the chance to leave a finger print on a life. For more information visit http://www.volunteercapitalcentre.org and http://www.volunteercapitalcentre.blogspot.com

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Benefits of Long term volunteering

May 11, 2012 by Leave a Comment

In recent years there has been an increase in the popularity of volunteering abroad. Young people in particular have increasingly looked to spend their summer holidays, or part of it, volunteering on a challenging and rewarding overseas placement.
While the benefits of volunteering can be invaluable, certain side effects of short term volunteering have emerged. Many companies have started to create volunteer programs of just a few weeks, tailored to “fit in” with young person’s schedules, rather than aiming to provide benefit to the local communities and a valuable experience to the volunteer.

There are a few important things to keep in mind and evaluate before choosing to volunteer abroad. Firstly volunteering abroad should not primarily be about enhancing your CV and snapping a few memorable pictures to show your friends back home. The aim should be to achieve a life changing experience for both volunteer and the local communities. Whilst you will gain the additional benefits of new skills and an opportunity to immerse yourself in the local culture, your actions will have a real impact and effect on the host community and it is important that this impact is wholly positive.

This is often something that is taken for granted by many volunteers. For example would be volunteers, should check that the organisation work with their host communities to ensure the local work force are not just being displaced by the volunteers. In this sense, short term volunteers can potentially be detrimental to local people and the local economy.

Therefore, before you choose a volunteer placement, your first aim should be to make sure that the project brings real benefits to the community. A volunteer placement of few weeks will not dramatically improve your skills and it will be more likely to affect the local community in an adverse way. It is also questionable whether you will have the time to truly get accustomed to the local culture or to gain skills such as learning a new language. A few weeks are unlikely to be enough time to implement a well thought out project, let alone enough time to see any of the benefits. You may find your experience disappointing, apart from a few pictures to display your friends with a bunch of faces rather than the names, stories and personalities of individuals.
Making a real impact on the community will require you first getting to know them. Only by becoming part of that community you will be able to make a real impact. While many choose attractive destinations for their volunteer placement more attention should be placed on the kind of the benefits you can provide.

It is understandable that many young people, who are deciding about their gap year, pick attractive destinations where they can travel and enjoy their time abroad. However, they should understand the benefits that fulfilling a long term placement may bring them.

When volunteers live somewhere for a long period of time, they become a real part of the community. They can meet the people, who will become their friends for life as well as people, who can be important for their future careers. The longer the volunteers decide to stay at one place, the better the local people can really get to know them.

Learning a foreign language is another important asset of spending a longer time abroad. Those who spend their gap year overseas, get a real opportunity to learn another language. The longer they live in the community, and interact with the local population, the more immersed they become in the language and so the local culture.

Spending your gap year volunteering is ultimately about helping people, meeting people, learning about people and another culture. Not about seeing as much as you can in a short period of time or filling a gap in your summer holidays. It is about the experience and the outcome, more than the destination.

Therefore, volunteers should bear in mind that when they decide to spend their gap year abroad it is not only about choosing the right destination and the type of work that they would like to do. It is about a life changing experience and what will be best for those the look to help.

By Roberta Geraci.
Roberta works for international youth development charity, Lattitude Global Volunteering (www.lattitude.org.uk), an organisation specialising in gap year and overseas volunteering opportunities. Started in 1972, Lattitude has 40 years experience and to date has sent over 40,000 volunteers worldwide.

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volunteer in Nepal with CWCS Nepal

October 22, 2010 by Leave a Comment

<p>Volunteer in Nepal with CWCS Nepal: Feel, join, experience & then help empowering the Orphans and Needy children in Nepal.

Are you in search of meaningful volunteering opportunities in Nepal? From which you can; gain a lot of rewarding & fulfilling experiences in life, feel that how significant your contribution will remain in future and would like to be a part of an initiatives for empowering the Orphans and Needy children in Nepal by involving yourself in to such kind of Project in Nepal, then CWCS Nepal could be your one stop solution for searching best volunteering opportunities for best volunteering experiences in Nepal….

Children Welfare Concern Society (CWCS), Nepal is a government registered nonprofit making NGO, working for addressing the alarming key issues on Children Welfare in Nepal. The main purpose of this organization is to preserve the children and their rights, those who have been suffering from natural disaster, conflict, losing their parents, poverty, and abandoned position due to conflict environment. Its focus is over the children’s rehabilitation and better development of them with good health, education, shelter of children with women’s Empowerment & to provide good opportunities.

On our part, working with international & national volunteers would be good for children and association for the good correspondent between different views and ideas for the children welfare concern as well. We can say that working with volunteers has proved to be a culturally and spiritually rewarding experience for us as well as for participating volunteers too! Whether you want to visit for a day, or stay for weeks or months, CWCS Nepal will welcome you with our open hearts for sharing the vision & mission of CWCS in order to promote the children welfare.

We would like to invite you to experience the real Nepal, through your participation in a CWCS Nepal’s volunteering program in Nepal.

Currently our volunteering opportunities are covered by following volunteering programs:

Orphanage Volunteering Program is an enriching and life changing experience for our volunteers as well as for the children too. The general role of the volunteer in this program will be to act as an older sibling: to care for, look after and encourage the children. Volunteers will teach the children general life skills, including health and sanitation, as well as arts, crafts and music. They may also help the children with their home work etc. As a volunteer at the orphanage in Nepal, you may also organize tours, games, drawing classes, singing, dancing, painting and other activities that children enjoy.

Teaching English Program: CWCS Nepal also provides teaching opportunities in Nepal, for volunteers who are interested to teach subjects such as mathematics, environmental science, pure science, international history, computer science, art, music, sports, physical health science and other vocational subjects.

Women Empowerment & Entrepreneurship Development Program: The development of every Child is directly related with the development of women in every society keeping this fact in high consideration, CWCS Nepal has been designing & implementing various projects to address the issues of women in Nepal by increasing public awareness of opportunities for economic and social self-development, by fostering social responsibility and self-reliance in developing villages, and by empowering local women to improve their lives and community through developing their entrepreneurial skills & capacity, so we would like to invite anyone interested in this program to be a part of an initiative for empowering Nepalese women.

Child Sponsorship Program in Nepal: Each year hundreds of children in Nepal become helpless either by losing their one parents or being abandoned by their own parents, in this case situation for them for living will be just no more than to struggle for surviving! This program is specifically designed to help educating these kinds of children those who are in extreme need of support for their further education.

If any individuals or organizations are willing to support CWCS Nepal and share their love through sponsoring a child in Nepal, please contact us at: cwcs.nepal@gmail.com , CWCS Nepal will provide you some of the children’s photos and details. Then you can choose one or more than one child as per your interest for sponsoring.

Beside those above mentioned program there are various other opportunities for volunteers who wish to contribute something meaningful on behalf of CWCS Nepal, for example volunteers can help us developing grant proposals for it’s various projects, take an initiatives for fund raising, helping in administrational works, or helping for further website development works of CWCS Nepal!

For further more information regarding CWCS Nepal & it’s volunteering program in Nepal please use the following contact details to contact us:

Children Welfare Concern Society (CWCS), Nepal.

G.P.O. Box 8975, EPC 2245.

Kathmandu, Nepal.

E-mail: cwcs.nepal@gmail.com

Website: http://www.cwcsnepal.org

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Volunteer Abroad Cultural Experience

August 5, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Culture has various meanings depending on the context it is put in, for example culture can be said to be excellence of taste in the fine arts and humanities, also known as high culture; or An integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for symbolic thought and social learning; The main definition of culture is the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group or country.  In this context you will learn to appreciate the various cultures we have in different parts of the world. The diversity makes all of us special. As you plan for your volunteer abroad, intern abroad or gap year work to which ever part of the world, knowing the cultural behavior of the local people is important. It will help you embrace the cultural experience more fully. The culture of a country or of a group of people is a generalization of how they behave but it shouldn’t be used as a standard for everybody because everyone individual is different and behaviors differently.  They should be used making quick decisions. Here are examples of how different cultures behave:
Kenya

Kenya has over 60 tribes which speak different languages. The most prominent tribes are the Kikuyu, Luhya and the Luo. The main languages spoken are English and Kiswahili. Kenyans are known to be kind and polite people. As a foreigner they will let you have your way, welcome you to their homes for as long as you want. Kenyans are warm hosts and will treat you like a close member of their families. In some case you will be treated better than the members of the family. They are also hard workers in that they wake up very early in the morning to go to work and come back very late in the evening. The other countries in the Eastern Africa regarded Kenyans as people who work too hard and they are very aggressive.

South Africa

They are a mix of black, white Asians and mixed race. The blacks are the majority while the others are the minority. The whites lead European lifestyles; they are the richest of the group. Although you can find whites in poorer suburbs like Ruyterwag, Goodwood, Maitland, Boksburg and Alberton. The most popular sports played in South Africa are Football, they hosted the 2010 world cup, Rugby, they are the current world cup winners, Cricket and surfing. The official languages spoken are English, Afrikaans, Ndebele, Northern Sotho, Southern Sotho, Swazi, Tsongo, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa and Zulu. When dealing with foreigners, most South Africans shake hands while maintaining eye contact and smiling. Greetings are leisurely and include time for social discussion and exchanging pleasantries. When you are invited for meals, you should be punctual.

Brazil

They consist of white, mixed white, black and Asian people. They all speak Portuguese except for a few who haven’t learnt the language. Brazilians have intermarried to the point that it sometimes seems that almost everyone has a combination of European, African and indigenous ancestry. The Brazilian families tend to be large and the extended families are very close. When greeting, the men shake hands when greeting one another, while maintaining steady eye contact; and women generally kiss each other on the cheeks. When invited for a meal in a Brazilian home, arrive 30 minutes to an hour later. The Brazilians are not big on punctuality. They dress elegantly; the women should wear suits or dresses that are elegant and feminine with good quality accessories. Manicures are expected and the men should wear conservative, dark colored business suits.

China

There are 56 distinct recognized ethnic groups in China; the Han are the most predominant tribe. The languages spoken are Cantonese and Mandarin. While many deities are part of the tradition, some of the most recognized holy figures include Guan Yin, Jade Emperor and Buddha. They play a number of games and Mahjong being the most famous. Their new year changes this year it was celebrated in February. They have a variety of meals but the most staple food eaten is rice.

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