Volunteer for Community Development & Protecting Endangered Mountain Gorillas in Rwanda

I was the first volunteer at Sacola Trust. This gave me the ability to define my own work and help where I thought it most needed, while aligning it with my strength. Though sometimes I lacked support I also learnt many valuable skills about working for an NGO in Rwanda. Now Sacola have grown and developed a volunteer program which will provide more support to volunteers while also allowing freedom for volunteers to make a real impact.

Musanze is a beautiful place in the world, right on the footsteps of the Volcanoes National Park. I loved exploring all of the remote villages in the area, meeting the people and most of all playing football with the local kids. Rwanda is a unique place that you need time to understand. So spending time with Sacola allows you to be engrained in the local culture and fully grasp the intricate details of Rwanda and their people.

I originally only wanted to stay in Rwanda for one week but then I fell in love with the country, its people and nature.

As one of the first volunteers of SACOLA, I had a lot of freedom in deciding what I wanted to do and where I could help most and I enjoyed that very much. One of my passions and skills I could use was photography - I joined SACOLA's fantastic tours, documented them and then used the pictures for marketing purposes. Furthermore, I taught English in a local school and experienced the sweetest and most motivated schoolchildren I've ever seen.

What I enjoyed the most, however, was living in a local family which treated me like a son from the very first moment on. So during my stay as a volunteer, I could not only help the local community and thus the mountain gorilla with my impactful work but also get an unique insight about the Rwandan culture.

I did social media for promoting SACOLA tours and SACOLA self. I improved the Instagram account & worked on Facebook. I Helped putting SACOLA on more volunteering sites to attract more volunteers, because they can use all the help. Especially western new insights would be very welcome. The site was already very nice, but I updated it with news. I taught in schools about the importance of learning English. Even teachers don't speak English very well and so I also explained a lot why self learning is so important. SACOLA is protecting community and wildlife around it so we also talked a lot about the environment with the children. At this moment I am still active for SACOLA to raise money to fund community projects. They want to built a new secondary school, they want to built an it-room, give running water to different communities and invest in local community by creating different kind of jobs and all this needs investment.