Program Reviews

This volunteering program have been such a blessing and a heart warming experience. VP Bali team is very hands on and friendly, they were so helpful from the beginning and made all the volunteers feel welcomed. I joined the Ubud Program and contributed as an English teacher, helping the children learn day to day spoken and written English. We help to make this learning experience a fun one that they enjoy and will want to continue. We maximize involvement of the students by playing games, teaching them new songs and spicing it up with a bit of friendly competition. The highlight of my experience is getting to know my students as individuals, their personality, their capabilities, and their stories.

I really enjoyed volunteering with vp Bali! It was an amazing and rewarding experience for me. I volunteered for two weeks at program WG in Bedulu, a village near Ubud.
Volunteering at the Yayasan school was really nice, even though I never teached before. Our class was quite advanced and we were very impressed by the children´s creativity and motivation. It was very much fun for us to create ideas every day to equip them with new knowledge.
I stayed with some other volunteers in a very nice compound of a local family. Ketut and Nyoman were wonderful hosts and were always there to help us. Ubud is very close by, 10-15 minutes by car or motorcycle and offers many opportunities for nice restaurants, yoga, shops,ect.
Kimberley and Jose were very friendly and supportive all the time and I felt very safe during my whole stay.
All in all, I highly recommend this program to everyone! It was so much fun and an experience I will never forget. Thank you so much vp Bali team!!!

Going with VP Bali for my first experience at volunteering was a great choice! Hose and Kimberley are two amazing, motivated and passionate people who work really hard to run their projects, support the local Balinese people, look after the volunteers and make sure you are safe and have fun. I volunteered for two weeks at the yayasan in Bedulu, about 15-20 min drive from the heart of Ubud. Staying in the cosy compound with the volunteers was really nice and we formed a kind of family! In the mornings breakfast would be served and we could spend the day how we wanted with class being in the afternoon. The children are great and it is inspiring to see them work so hard. We could also go into Ubud at night to enjoy the amazing restaurants, as well as live music and shopping. It helps if you can drive a motorbike at this project so you can go to Ubud when you need without the expense of a taxi!
Kimberley and Hose are very supportive, giving you an orientation of Ubud to begin with and giving a run through of how the projects work and what to expect, as well as always being available to talk and help whenever you need. They were more than I could ask for!
Overall, my experience was really inspiring and eye opening. I would highly recommend going through VP Bali if you want to volunteer as well as meet lots of new people, feel safe and well looked after!
Thanks VP Bali!

its a pleasure of meeting vp bali team and teaching the most wonderful kids! they are very curious, motivated and eager to learn.such a pleasure to teach and to stay on bali! thank you VP Bali for this program and your support during our stay

I love - the fact that the supervisor is always there to guide the volunteer and that the supervisor are both as a friend and supervisor, that we have gatherings/ dinner when volunteer leaves, the fact that one of the focus of the class attitude is to combine fun & learning,the fact that the kids are eager to learn.

my experience - It was really fun and one of the awesome thing about this teaching program is that I ended up learning too! about the culture of Bali, about these kids, their daily lives, and the way they think. To experience the peaceful and healthy lifestyle of Bali. Its a good feeling when after you teach for a while you notice the progress and improvements that these kids have. I feel attached to these kids even after a week of teaching, once you get to know their personalities and how clever they are. Now I feel that I would love to stay more than 2 weeks, however, I cant, as I was not prepared to do so.

One major difficulty was the fact that we were teaching English, a subject with many exceptions to its general rules. Also, explaining the logic behind our sentence construction was difficult. However, we managed to teach them using examples and physical interactions, such as asking them to find the contrast between hard and soft by pinching their table and hand and seeing which hurt more. We were also able to lighten the atmosphere of the class by bring cheeky.

I really enjoyed the programme and the children are just brilliant. Teaching them and seeing them smile was the hightlight of my day.

An example of my day to day teaching would be starting with the alphabet song and asking them to pronouce the letters, then what day it is?, then working on 2 letters a day with 3 categories (food,place and animal). So we started with the letter 'A' and split them into 2 teams and we gave them 10 minutes to find as any words as they can. It was really great to see them working as a team and funny to see how competitive they are. After time was up we would go through each word and get them to pronounce it and ask them if they know what it is and then later announce the winner :)

We also went through body parts and played Simon says with them - they are really bright.

With the older class we also did all the above but went more advanced on the body parts and also went into vowels which they picked up very quickly.

We sang heads shoulders knees and toes which they really enjoyed.

All the children's are very creative and amazing. On our first day we gave them some plain paper to write their names on so we can call them by their names. I just expected them to write their name on it but they got really creative and started writing in bubble hand writing and adding all these special affects.

I never encountered any difficulties, the children are just brilliant and I wish I could have spent more time with them.

Just continue what you doing and make sure these kids get the best out of it.

It's very good that we stayed in the same homestay with all volunteers since it's easy to meet others. I liked teaching children, as they were very enthusiastic and excited about everything we did. It was difficult sometimes to feel that the classes really reached the goal of the organization. Some issues were that there were a lot of children in one class or we had to repeat lessons because some did not come to school everyday.

Like I said, during the moments I was teaching, I really enjoyed my experience and it's so nice to feel the appreciation of the children. So glad that I have the experience of volunteering!

I have no complaints about working with VP Bali. From the beginning I knew exactly where my money was going and saw the passion of the coordinators myself. Kimberley, Hosé and Novia eat, sleep and breathe VPB and are very inspirational people.

As one of the first volunteers to contribute to this program (I started two weeks into the program) one of the most important things we had to focus on was establishing the level of the students English. By creating fun ways to assess this, myself and my teaching partner never got bored and smiled and laughed our ways through the lessons. The students are so eager to learn and so bright. When we initially started teaching we had nothing by a blackboard to aid our teaching which was such a shame because the students are so creative. We gained some coloured pencils and paper at the beginning of our second week however, which really made a difference and the students really enjoyed using these. As we provide free after school English lessons its important we created a fun learning environment and them showing up every day was incredibly rewarding for me as their teacher.

The home stay the volunteers were allocated is fantastic. The family are warm and welcoming and it has a fantastic location - the centre of Jalan Goodamer. Living with the other four volunteers was really special and I have made some really good friends through this program.

I worked at VPB for two weeks and was warned that I may want to stay longer at the end. I really wish I could! All of us volunteering have said that we would stay longer if we could. At the end of my second week I was very comfortable with the class and really enjoying watching their English grow and wish I could stay on longer to watch it develop even further. I suppose I will just have to return!

During my whole time traveling, I wanted to do some voluntary work to give something back to people who aren't as lucky as I am and I'm so glad I decided to do this with VP Bali. My two weeks in Ubud were over way too soon and it was definitely one of the highlights of my trip!

We were the first volunteers of this program, so in the beginning it was new for everyone, the coordinators and us. Because it was the first time for me teaching English, it was definitely a challenge, but the coordinators helped us and we were two volunteers teaching a class, so it was more fun every day. We could really see how the students get better and better every day, they are so motivated to learn English!

A highlight was the last week was when there was a big ceremony in the temple next to the school, so we were wearing sarongs while we were teaching, and we could see a cockfight and we were even invited to watch a perfomance by the people living in the village!
These are things you would never see as a tourist.

To sum it up: I'm a bit sad that my two weeks volunteering in Ubud passed so fast, and although I needed one or two days to really feel comfortable in front of the class, it was a great experience and a great way to experience the Balinese culture as well as helping to give the children a chance to learn English. I'll miss them!