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I spent several months with my girlfriend Caroline trying to decide what we were going to do on our 6 month break in South America. We knew that we wanted to do some form of volunteer project and neither of us particularly wanted to work with humanitarian projects. We used the internet, mainly, to research the companies that would offer us an exciting project for between two and three months working with animals, wildlife or even just in a remote location. We considered many of the large obvious companies like Raleigh International, Trek Force, Greenforce and of course Global Vision International (GVI). |
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We also looked at smaller projects but found that they were largely unsupported and therefor it was hard to achieve a lot unless you were qualified a s a biologist, vet or had significant experience in these areas. Caroline and I had no such qualifications or experience so we were forced to rule these options out. We also ruled out Trek Force and Raleigh International fairly early on. They were too Gap Year orientated and we had both completed 4 years at University so we wanted a fairly mature organisation where the emphasis was on work, as well as play, rather than being just an organised holiday. |
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The final two candidates for us were therefor GVI and Greenforce. What finally swung us was the fact that GVI were starting a new project in Ecuador. To us the fact that things could go wrong and that we were the guinea pigs of the new location was a real attraction. We were also impressed with the pre departure support and liked the idea that the project was investigative in nature. Rather than being specific to an individual species it was more general and we would have a chance to look at birds, mammals, frogs, insects, flowers and plants. But the true deciding factor was the size of the reserve we were going to be working on; 53,000 hectares - possibly the worlds largest research area! |