Not what you expect from the programme description!
Hi, I just finished my time volunteering with LV in Costa Rica and wanted to share my experience, as I mostly only could find reviews for African or Asian countries on the internet before my trip. I was in Jaco Beach and joined the Educational Support programme by LV. Unfortunately I would absolutely not recommend this programme. I was supposed to stay for 6 weeks but left after just 1.5 weeks. I think that because Love Volunteers is such a huge organization who have programmes all over the world, they don’t really know what’s going on at every project location. I had so many struggles arriving before even volunteering. The circumstances of the project don’t allow volunteers to actually help and make a difference. The programme description on the website was very different and while you expected to actually make a difference here and feel like you could make an impact on the children life, you were just disappointed. I was supposed to go into schools and help the children learn English. Firstly, we were at a public school, where they desperately needed our help with English but unfortunately the school was super unstructured (which is of course normal that the circumstances are not the best) and the English teacher was barely there (the English teacher had personal issues and was barely coming to school to teach). The children were just missing out in their opportunity to learn English. We weren’t allowed to teach a class ourselves, so we were just assigned random cleaning tasks around the school. Because we were upset about not giving the chance to help the children (while also only being in school for an hour daily) they managed to assign us to a different school. The new school: A private bilingual school, teachers from the US, students fluent in English…no help needed. Now that sadly wasn’t the intention of the programme at all anymore. Those kids at the public school needed the help but sadly the school and programme managers couldn’t make it accessible to them. This of course is just a single experience, but I think that the situation at the school has been like that for a while. Which LV should’ve known about and in my opinion shouldn’t have offered this programme anymore. Also, which for me is also a part of volunteering, that I expected was to be in a community of other volunteers who are helping out as well. If you’re looking for a fun experience with other volunteers who share the same passion for helping as you, then definitely don’t join this programme. When I arrived there was one more guy here, who before me was alone for a few weeks. If you’re planning to stay long term than you should maybe consider that. If I had know about it before, I would’ve thought twice about it. Of course this is also only because I’m a young student taking a gap year and wanna have fun experiences while volunteering. Overall, I think that other locations might be a better option if you rlly wanna make a difference and volunteer. But what I rlly appreciate is that LV tried to better my experience here and look for alternatives. They also rlly just weren’t aware of the situation here and tried to adjust it.
Response from provider
Thanks for your honest account, Katharina. I worked with you through the issues and agree completely with your summary: that the public school needs the assistance but finds it hard to provide support to volunteers. The private school supports volunteers well; but is well resourced with teachers. This conundrum is one that we face on many programs. It is a shame that we were not able to resolve the issues at the public school before you left. We do try to spread volunteers out between programs, to provide the best benefit and I agree that, if you are looking for a group travel trip which is focused on fun, this is not the right program for you.
