Traveller Not Tourist:

Jay’s Journey by

Jay Chavez

Part 3: Hopeful Angels

After my amazing experience at Inti Wara Yassi, I found I was thinking differently about the rest of my trip.  Originally, I was planning to travel almost the entire length of Chile, which would mean lots of beautiful sights but not much time to really engage with places or people. If I am honest, I had found some of my travelling time to be a little lonely. Perhaps this is a weakness of mine but I felt that the loneliness really stemmed from feeling a bit useless and disconnected from reality when I was staying in travellers hostels and going on trips with other foreigners. This was completely different to the feelings I had whilst I was volunteering.

Although I was also spending a lot of time with foreigners, I felt as if they were more “on my wavelength” and I loved the sense of community and the opportunity to interact on a deeper level with the local people, and even the places. When everything is new every day it is hard to take it all in, but when you walk the same jungle path every day for a month you notice the smell of this tree, the blossom there, the tell-tale rustle of a small creature in the undergrowth, and it makes for a more memorable and more meaningful experience.  After thinking about it for a short time I decided to sacrifice my time in Chile in favour of getting to know Bolivia and Peru better and doing more volunteering. Best decision I ever made!

I’d heard of a project in a jungle town in Bolivia where volunteers help in a school, it sounded good so after a few days in Santa Cruz with a friend from IWY I hopped on another bus and headed for the “Angels of Hope” in Villa Tunari (http://www.projectangelsofhope.org). Luckily my arrival to this project was at a more sociable time of day!

The project was being run by two American volunteer directors who were very organised – so quite a noticeable difference from IWY straight away. The accommodation was in a big house which was shared by a Bolivian family who work on the project, which was great because we got to play with the kids and practice our Spanish on their parents. Spanish lessons were also included so I learned lots of useful things, including the words to “Pasame la botella” (a song about drinking), which I subsequently sang along to in various South American nightclubs!

The project itself is a school, which catered for 140 children when I was there - teaching and feeding them - with a doctor's surgery attached which provides free healthcare for local poor families. The volunteer work was mainly helping to complete the construction of the school but we also served the children their meals, cleaned the classrooms and helped with the bus journey home. The bus was my favourite job - 140 children between the ages of 6 months and 6 years on a coach, trundling through the jungle on a 3 hour round trip to take them all home. On the way we passed the local rubbish dump (horrifying), a market (where we sometimes stopped to buy provisions) and lots of jungle dwellings where family members awaited the return of the schoolchildren.

At the start of the journey the kids were always at their wildest: fighting and fussing, shouting and screaming, kicking and pulling hair, standing on seats and sticking arms and heads out of windows. I learned a lot of Spanish orders during this time; gems such as "No saques la cabeza" (don't stick your head out) and "No jales el pelo" (don't pull hair) were particularly well used on those crazy jungle journeys. Some volunteers hated riding the bus but not me; not because I enjoy shouting orders at unruly kids but because I felt I was getting a glimpse into a hidden world, and mostly because, as we got towards the end of the 3 hours, I was able to really connect with the kids. Some of them would fall asleep, looking so sweet and innocent after all their battles and misbehaviour, others would sit on my lap and we'd talk and laugh, and enjoy looking out of the window together. Precious moments.

"Angels of Hope" just happened to be located in the same town as the other Inti Wara Yassi site so I got to check that out as well (although I was just a visitor this time). It was nice to see the main site, which was much bigger and therefore had many more animals. I felt I had made the right decision going to the more remote "Parque Ambu Ari" as it was more rough and ready there, and therefore more of a challenge, and a better opportunity to grow and learn about myself.

I think there's an important point to be made here - that it's important to know WHY you want to volunteer and WHAT you can really put up with. Everyone has a different idea of what is acceptable and what is not, some people can go without a shower for a week, others find the prospect of a day without their hair straighteners quite horrifying. This does not affect your ability to volunteer but I think it does mean that you should think differently about which organisation/project you should volunteer with. When I went to Malaysia (see part 1), there was one guy who decided that he wasn't interested in the work, he wanted to go home but the leaders convinced him to stay and see if it grew on him. It didn't. He spent all day, every day, sitting around watching the rest of us sweat and toil. Not only did this cause a certain amount of resentment in the other volunteers but I am pretty sure he did not have a good time.

So, whilst many people decide to volunteer partly to challenge themselves, it is important to be realistic because if you choose a challenge you cannot, or don't really want to, rise to, you may end up hurting rather than helping and you may also end up very miserable. Worst of all, you might put yourself off volunteering entirely! When choosing a volunteer program, try to consider your skills, your passions and your strengths but also your deficiencies, your dislikes and your weaknesses. That's not to say the latter 3 cannot be overcome, just that they should be taken into account. That said, it's amazing what you can do if you try! I'm pretty sure that, if you had asked me beforehand whether I would be able to control 140 children, who speak a different language, on a long journey through the jungle I would have said no, and I never would have dreamt I would enjoy it so much!

Next up - Part 4: The Lake that looks like an Ocean

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