Some positive experiences but a really disappointing performance from VAF I'm afraid!

When looking for a volunteering placement in Ghana, I read some VAF reviews on here, looked at the prices and thought I'd found a really good deal for myself and my brother. My ten weeks in Ho, however, have left me with mixed feelings - we had some fantastic times but there were lots of negatives too and as I re-read the glowing feedback from previous volunteers now, it's as if their reviews are of a different organization altogether!

We were sent to the Remar orphanage where, for the vast majority of the time, only one resident was a young child and the rest were teenage boys who didn't really need volunteers to be there at all. Apparently lots of younger boys had recently been moved to a different Remar centre, but we hadn't been told about this in advance and for six weeks, there were three volunteers (myself, my brother and another girl) trying to play with/teach one child! I had nothing against the older boys themselves, of course, but the reality of the 'orphanage program' we'd signed up for unfortunately fell a long way short of my expectations as there was no 'program' whatsoever and nobody even seemed to care whether we were trying to make ourselves useful or not. In addition, we found Olivier, who is in charge of the orphanage, extremely uncomfortable to be around. He behaved completely unprofessionally and inappropriately throughout, and we even considered moving but weren't offered a satisfactory alternative.

Eric seemed nice and was helpful before we arrived, but became rather illusive during our stay. Even after we'd made a few complaints, he didn't seem too bothered whether we were happy with how things were going or not. He was apologetic at first and partially solved our problems, but he always claimed to be rushed off his feet and we felt like our criticisms were a nuisance to him. He didn't communicate very well either and wasn't always contactable, which is understandable but not really acceptable when we didn't really have any other point of contact at VAF (we were never even introduced to Alex).

Our teaching experiences whilst in Ho were varied. The first school we were placed at was fairly priviliged with plenty of properly trained teachers (by Ghanaian standards anyway!), so we didn't see much point in volunteers being there at all. We then requested to be moved and had a much more positive time at our second placement. At this school, lots of the children couldn't read so we took them for private tutoring to improve their literacy, which proved to be very rewarding. The school was disorganized and the teachers were mostly terrible at both teaching and telling us what to do, but we used our own intiatives and I think this was why we felt we were more needed there.

All in all, I'm glad I went to Ghana but sadly I think VAF have a lot of issues to iron out. Their price was very reasonable compared to other organizations and, I must admit, I spoke to several volunteers from different NGOs who were experiencing similar problems to us relating to not feeling useful enough, but I still wouldn't rush to recommend the program. There wasn't a huge amount of support and I can't say I felt like I was part of a team or community striving to do great things, which was disappointing. Had we not made a bit of noise about what we wanted/expected from the trip, I don't think it would have been very rewarding at all. I wish I could leave a more positive review, but I don't think my expectations were unreasonably high and yet I'm afraid I found VAF to be mediocre at best!