STA travel volunteer - South America

as a travel company sta travel is very good and i have used them a lot in the past.

but volunteering? no. and thats ANY volunteering. paying a small fortune to a company that lets you ve a basic skivvy on a shed building project with questionable benefitto local communities is never worth it. if you want to make a difference in the world tgen get skills and quals that can be useful such as nursing, medicine, education etc THEN volunteer.

until then just enjoy your travels.

apologies about spelling and grammar im on my mobile!

Thankyou so much mikehuxley :)

I had no idea STA even had volunteering opportunities. To second the above post, I've seen volunteering come up as a topic quite often.. worth a forum search at least, since I think there's a good sticky or two about it. Great idea, but you really want to do a lot of investigating beforehand to make sure you're doing something genuinely beneficial to the local community you're in.

Muteki, they do, but like many other travel companies they are 'volunteering' opportunities in the sense that you pay them a huge fee, they take a big cut and then plonk you somewhere to do a menial job for a length of time with very little if any discernable or quantifiable benefit to the locals. It is the type of volunteering for people with no qualifications or skills that could benefit any true charity or NGO, but want a couple of weeks 'volunteering' to a) assuage any guilt for the fact that they are travelling through these poor, defenceless countries and of course they should help (yes I am aware of how patronising that sounds, that is the point), b) they want a good travel story to boast about and make themselves feel better, 'oh, the time I was volunteering in ...', or c) they want a good profile picture of them cuddling a baby Orang or something for their facetwitter things. In other words, it is voluntourism, not volunteering.

Ahh, yes, Mike. Hit the nail on the head, or a more detailed version of what I was hinting at. That's my response when people ask if I'll be volunteering on my RTW trip... almost verbatim.