Experiencing the real world

I needed a challenge and wanted to experience a totally new environment while doing something meaningful. That was when I discovered the program, that One World Center offered. I liked the idea of having an intense study period before you actually go out to the communities in St. Vincent as a volunteer. And having completed the program I can say it helped me a lot to learn about the country, culture and people first. I understood the way they interact and their way of life better.

As soon as we arrived on the Caribbean island I was already in love with the people, the nature and the lifestyle here. With my team of nine people, we moved to a small town on the coastline. There I was our task to build backyard gardens using the permaculture principles. Our goal was to make the people more independent and self-sustaining by growing their own food. Besides, we came up with our own little projects: We organized a beach clean-up, taught climate classes to locals and built a seed nursery.
We meet a lot of interesting people and everyone was very warm and welcoming. In general, I would say this program made me a lot more open-minded.
Of course, not everything went well all the time as we faced a lot of challenges. For example, the dialect that is spoken in St. Vincent is hard to understand. But also, sometimes we didn’t have enough materials to build the gardens and we had to be creative. That is also one of the most important skills I learned during my time here: to be flexible, improvise and just be able to figure out solutions.

The best thing for me in this program was, that I met so many like-minded people. Everyone here pursues the same goal to make the world a little better. Just being around these people and having such an inspiring environment every day. And that’s also why I would always choose to do this program a