The difficulties of planning an internship/volunteer trip

So as I’ve mentioned in my previous posts, I have been less nomadic and spent the past few months working in California. I have also been trying to find an internship or volunteer opportunity in South America in the human rights field.

This is not as easy a task as it may seem. While volunteer abroad websites are plentiful, they are often incredibly expensive. Spend $2500 for two weeks WITHOUT airfare? Not for a budget traveler like me! This has eliminated maybe 3/4 of websites out there.

Another problem is finding out if the program you will be working with is reputable. Information is scarce, but if you do enough digging you can find many online forums where volunteer alum offer their insight to prospective volunteers. Through Gap Year Forums  (http://boards.gapyear.com/), I found out that the animal rescue center  I wanted to volunteer at had undergone a lot of changes in recent years and might not be an ideal place to volunteer. Helpful!

My area of interest was also difficult. Human rights organizations usually aren’t interested in someone doing a short-term (relatively) internship or require law degrees or someone in law school. I’m not there yet. If I wanted to volunteer at an orphanage, there are about 50 million places. But that wasn’t what I wanted, so I continued my search.

Finding a low-budget reputable place that fit my desires seemed like an impossible task. I didn’t want to shell out a lot of money, but I also was specifically looking for something in the legal field (except for that whole animal rescue thing!). Finally, I gave up trying to find one that was relatively low cost and instead found one that was not as expensive.

I ventured on to http://idealist.org and spent a long time searching and bookmarking places. I finally settled on ELI Abroad – a program based in Denver that works with people to find volunteer and internship placements in 23 countries. They have a wide area of interests, and relatively low costs compared to other similar countries. For a 10 week internship program in Ecuador, I will be paying $1645 (plus airfare and insurance), including room and board. While many hardcore travelers scoff at the idea of paying to volunteer, sometimes it is necessary if you are looking for specific programs.

I leave May 13th and will be interning for a Women’s Rights group in Quito, Ecuador. I’m frantically trying to get everything together, and remember some of those irregular Spanish verbs. I will be updating on how the program goes once I get going.

If you are interested in doing some international volunteering, there are a lot of interesting options out there. Here’s a short list of websites to check out.

http://idealist.org (large database of volunteer opportunities)

http://www.wwoof.org/ (Free volunteer opportunities on organic farms)

http://www.volunteersouthamerica.net/ (Free to low cost volunteering in South America.)

http://www.transitionsabroad.com/ (Travel/Volunteer/Job/Internship Database)

http://www.ecoteer.com/ (Low cost “Responsible” volunteering)

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