High cost for a mediocre experience

Volunteering with CCS was very mediocre. Yes, they give you food and a place to sleep, but the staff seemed very over protective and more concerned with rules than with preparing their volunteers to do useful, sustainable work. The best part of my trip was when I left the home base and spent 2 weeks traveling in Tanzania on my own. While with CCS, I worked with a local public health organization and found out during my time there that the program staff really had no idea what the organization does and could offer no advice on how to help them in a sustainable way. Also, the program is extremely expensive and I always got nebulous responses when I asked what the money was used for. Additionally, the program staff didn’t seem to understand that after having paid the tremendous program fee, I was now travelling on a very tight budget. All of their suggestions for post-program travel were for the fancy “mzungu” (white person) hotels and busses and beaches which is not at all what I was looking for. While at the program base, there are so many required activities that I didn’t feel that I got much of a chance to explore the town where we were working or get to know local people – I spent most of my time getting carted around from one activity to the next with upper-middle class white Americans. The program staff even found it strange when I would refuse a ride to my placement which was a mere 5-minute walk from the homebase. I did learn a fair amount of basic Swahili there, but I can’t say that was thanks to the lessons that we had. Our teacher was less than spectacular and mostly gave us long lists of vocabulary words that she would read out loud to us. If you’re really looking for an easy and comfortable first trip out to another country CCS will give you that, but if you’re looking for a deeper experience with a lower price tag I would recommend looking elsewhere.