Best time of my life!!!

Most of the activities we carried out have been mentioned in other reviews so I don’t want to spend time writing about it. I would rather share my overall experience there.
I have always wanted to volunteer abroad but it always seemed impossible (especially when I first saw the price of ISV programme). However, what I learnt travel should never be a matter of money but of courage so get out of your comfort zone. I know there are plenty of other alternatives but ISV seemed to provide a really good service judging from previous participants’ reviews. So I chose ISV and I will never regret it.
As we have been told during our project week, you see a bigger picture when working in a smaller community. This is a very brief description of ‘voluntourism’, a concept introduced to us by the co-founder of VA32 (volunteer africa), Mike. It is very true when you go into a community and really get to see how they carry out their daily life, what are their living conditions and so on. These things are impossible for you to see if you had joined any ordinary tour. What you would have seen is just a plain huge statue of Nelson Mandela(about 3 metres tall) and you will go and take a selfie with it and that’s it without being able to appreciate what the man has done for the country. If you are like this, you can consider yourself a tourist not traveller. Travel, not to escape life but for life not to escape us.
The two weeks of project was eye-opening. You WILL make friends for life and you WILL miss everything there once you get back to your home country. Do not forget to join the adventure tour because you will do things you will never do again like riding at the back of ‘bucky’ (4 by 4), watching lions and cubs walked past you, seeing the big 5, jumping off cliffs, singing songs in the bus, watching ‘Lion King’ in South Africa, getting to know who can fall asleep the fastest in a bus ride and what not. After the 2 weeks of volunteering, you deserve to have some fun so join the adventure tour. You will get to meet more people from other projects and now the list of people you are going to miss just gets longer. Also, you get to have more stamps on your passport.
There are a lot more things I could write about but I guess no one will really read the whole review if I keep on writing. Let me end my review with a quote written on the wall of ‘Back to Basics’, where we learnt scuba diving in Mozambique, “there is no adventure in your comfort zone” .