1 Week in Costa Rica with no support from the staff

I spent an interesting and sometimes challenging week volunteering with my boyfriend in this programme in August 2017.

The good parts:

- The local guides were excellent, they took us on patrol at night to search for nesting turtles. The aim of these patrol's was to stop Poachers from killing turtles and stealing their eggs. We undertook several patrols and saw two beautiful green turtles laying eggs.

-the Project is mostly run by volunteers, who were very passionate and hands on. We've met lovely people and made some new friends.

The bad parts:

-The local employees of the programme were terrible and disengaged from day one. They didn't bother showing up at the bus station to collect us as arranged and failed to inform us about it. We've had to go round in circles phoning out of date contacts to finally get somewhere. When we arrived in at the project they briefly showed us to our homestay and for the rest of the week we never saw them again.

-The people of our homestay were lovely and very welcoming. We were prepared for humble living conditions, however the homestay lacked basic hygiene and was infested by bugs and roaches.

At the moment I would not recommend this particular organisation, as it feels that they are completely detached from the project. The volunteers are left to organise their own schedules and activities throughout the week. It wouldn't take much to improve the experience, but I feel an internal restructure of the organisation is needed.