Program Reviews

I spent two months at El Terreno working on a water project. The mission was very interesting and truly interdisciplinary. I got the chance to engage in many different activities (interviews, community meetings, site visites, classes with the local school…), work with a multidisciplinary team, discover a complete new environment, and contribute into the well-being of the community.
I would definitely recommend this internship to anyone willing to help local people, or to apply their skills into concrete projects.
On top of that, I met incredible people, saw amazing landscapes and made memories that I’ll never forget.

Working on the water project has really given me valuable experience. Having recently graduated from university, I wanted to gain experience in the field and really put my skills into practice and I feel like this internship fulfilled that. There was a mixture of physical work including site visits as well as some desktop work, and this balance of work really worked for me. There is opportunity to work and talk to members of the local community and really get involved in the project. Also, the internship mentors taught me so much during my time there and are genuinely amazing mentors. Joshua is also a great leader who you can can seek help regarding a work/internship issues but also your personal well-being too, which I really appreciated. Finally, I stayed with a local host family who were so accommodating and great hosts to live with. This experience is a great opportunity to meet people and and it was an experience I will never forget and will value forever.

I had an amazing experience with El Terreno. I participated in their Culture and Anthropology internship and learned more than I could ever have expected. The support from Joshua and Karina throughout the process was outstanding and my experience in a homestay and with the other volunteers and interns was absolutely amazing. My project developed throughout the 2.5 months I stayed in Ecuador and El Terreno was flexible and encouraging and helped with figuring out the next steps as I went. I am so blessed to have had this experience and would strongly recommend to anyone else who is considering.

My time and internship at El Terreno provided me with the perfect opportunity to combine my vision and ambitions with my profession. I learned tons by doing an internship in sustainable architecture. Joshua and Karina are very kind and put in a lot of effort to ensure I, and the other people staying there, had a good time and they helped us organizing activities on the weekends. Ecuador is a beautiful country and with the right people you're sure of an excellent time. I found those people here and would recommend more people to join their program!

The internship here in Atandahua was amazing. I got to learn and improve my medical skills as a 4th year student and was immersed in a very different setting. The rural indigenous population has a very different relationship with healthcare which was very enriching and eye-opening.
Next to the medical part, I got to learn a lot from the other volunteers in construction work and agriculture and could lend a hand in the afternoon, which made me feel super integrated to the group very fast.
I also improved my Spanish a lot and got to share the culture with locals firsthand in my host family.
In the weekends you can go roaming around in Ecuador sightseeing and visiting places, both nature and cities. Ecuador is a very rich and diverse country with 4 major biomes so there is plenty to see!
In short, amazing experience, don't think twice!

I spent 4 weeks at El Terreno, and loved my time there! I volunteered in the mornings with the manual work at the house (building barbed-wire fences, digging ditches, chopping trees, building a gate), and spent the afternoons doing my internship in the form of research for my bachelors dissertation in anthropology. I loved the community that I became a part of in Atandahua, both with the neighbours as well as with the volunteers that lived with me in casa communal! My time there involved a lot of different activities: cooking classes learning to make tortillas and empenadas with a new local friend, minga’s, class-prepping for the kids in the afternoon, visiting the nearby communities for research, as well as celebrating both the project anniversary and a local lantern festival that I was lucky to have been a part of my time there! (They love celebrating in Ecuador as you’ll come to find in your own time there too!) I spent my free time with the other volunteers, and we would sometimes go into Guanujo to have dinner together, celebrate each others birthdays, watch football matches, danced salsa and whatever other fun activities we came up with doing together. (The volunteer community is really what you make it yourself which is always fun!) And then of course playing with all the dogs that became a part of my time there too! The internship was really flexible which was awesome in my case for collecting research and needing to alter it over time and follow what opportunities would come up! I also got better at Spanish during my time there as I was practicing everyday, and the neighbours were always up for a chat! This project is great if you want to do research in a lot of areas!! Mine was in anthropology and so I looked at the project holistically, but there are many avenues for doing research here, and I am sure, as with me, the owner is more than willing to accommodate your research/project whatever form that might take!