Working with Kids—Volunteer in Costa Rica!

I had a great experience volunteering with Maximo Nivel in Quepos. Their program is advertised as Manuel Antonio, but it’s actually Quepos (which is better tbh for a more local experience). For our first two weeks here, I volunteered in a church, running a sort of summer camp. For the last 8 weeks, I volunteered in a Kindergarten class. We volunteered 2 and 3 hours a day, respectively. If I’m being honest, I wish we had more time volunteering. The program isn’t cheap, and I came to volunteer my time so I didn’t feel satisfied at the amount of time we had to volunteer. It feels as though they break up the shifts in three hour increments to fit more volunteers into the schedule. With that in mind, most of your day outside of those couple hours are free if you like to have more downtime to visit the beautiful beaches or go on tours. The program is advertised to people with any Spanish ability, but I would highly reccomend at least speaking on an intermediate level or you will have a really hard time actually helping, communicating, or making friends. In touristy places, most people speak english but at volunteer placements, they do not. Making connections with individuals at my volunteer site and within the community was what made my experience really incredible. If I had not put as much effort into doing so, I would not have had as positive of an experience. Please reach outside of your comfort zone, and outside of the organization to make connections, learn, and explore. It will completely change your experience volunteering and your life.

This was definitely out of my comfort zone, I also haven’t worked around too many kids in my life but this program was worth it for sure, I’m not sure what kind of impact two weeks would have on a group of kids but I like to think I helped to some extent. I got to experience kids of different ages and their culture and how they perceive the world versus how I would coming from Canada, I personally believe you need to do this for more than a week to get the best of the program especially being around kids who probably see multiple volunteers come in and out of their location.

My goal of the program was to gain new perspective, see how others around the world live, and impact the lives of young kids. I can say I accomplished all of this in the program. I would definitely recommend this to others wishing to do the same.