Costa Rica Animal Rescue Project

I had very mixed feelings whilst volunteering abroad at the Costa RIca Animal Rescue Centre with Frontier. Overall the experience was mostly adequate, there are a lot of animals you get to interact with, you mostly spend the time cleaning their cages in which if your lucky a monkey or kinkajou may jump on your head! Time is also spent maintaining the gardens, checking the animals have food and water, preparing the food, etc. One of my major problems with this project was the lack of management (this was partially due to the fact that 1 week I was there the volunteer co-ordinator was on holiday and some long-term volunteers were in charge who weren't great, the 2nd week was better but not as good as I've perviously experienced). I don't know if I'd recommend this project to first-time volunteers simply because there isn't anyone holding your hand if that makes sense. There is no one telling you what to do, or how to do the tasks (which is highly problematic in some cases), it's very un-organised therefore I think you need to be a very proactive person who can take their own initiative and work independently. Also whilst I was there, there were A LOT of volunteers so jobs were limited. You actually only really worked 3 hours max in a day if you just did two tasks, therefore as I said being proactive really helps as you need to find things to do to spend your time. Despite the lack of management and organisation, I do think this place is worth volunteering at although I think you should go with helping in mind not just because you want to cuddle a sloth or touch a monkey. They need real help to release these animals and take care of the ones they can't, and I think they have a pretty good chance if they pull themselves together and have some good volunteers to support them.