"Volunteer Spring/Summer '08 for just £50 a week!"
(Offer Subject to Availability)
Ecuador City Guide
Information and advice about where to go on your travels while you are not volunteering
El Projecto / La Colocación / La Situation / Aplicación & Precios
The Work
How Volunteers Work With the Project
The role of the volunteers within the project is crucial to its success. Funding and equipment cannot be properly utilised without people to manage them. The school at Km35 has one teacher teaching 30 children from 6 different school grades. Volunteers enable the school to be split into classes, allowing the teacher to give focused lessons to a smaller number of children, and giving the children a more stable and diverse teaching environment.
Unlike many other volunteer programs, the Arajuno Road Project aims to integrate volunteer lessons into the annual curriculum. This gives the pupils a structured learning program and ensures that volunteers efforts and enthusiasm have a long term effect. To enable this, volunteers will be allocated lessons and assignments according to their strengths, and all volunteers will have the opportunity to help create an improved education for the local children. The importance of speaking English in an area which has tourism as a key growth market and a global economy where speaking English is vital.
What Volunteers Do
Volunteers will primarily work in one of the 8 schools between the provincial town of Puyo and Km36 of the Arajuno Road. Lessons are between 7am and 12pm Monday-Friday and volunteers will have the opportunity to assist teachers or take classes for 2 and a half - 3 hours each day.
Each afternoon volunteers will spend time in teams planning the following days lessons. Volunteers will work with our co-ordinators to plan lessons that form part of a structured curriculum, giving volunteers clear guidance and support. In addition to academic activities, volunteers will also have the chance to teach sports, art or music.
Summer School
In Ecuador, schools terms are from January to the end of June and from September until the middle of December. In the intervening months the Arajuno Road Project will run a summer school. During the summer holidays many of the children are left with little to occupy them, the summer school is designed to give them more creative freedom than they have during term time. The Arajuno Road summer school placement is focused on sport, art and music, and volunteers will also have the opportunity to put their own ideas into action.
Community Projects
Arajuno Road Project
During the same period as the summer school the Arajuno Road Project will also be running local community projects. These are subject to funding and what is needed but placements can be anything to redecorating the school to sprucing up the local community to fitting clean running water into local homes.
Accommodation: the Volunteer House
The volunteers live in a communal house on the Arajuno Road. The house provides spacious dorm rooms, a kitchen, living area, working area and hot showers. Food costs are included and volunteers take turns to prepare evening meals. Bedding is also provided. The volunteer house is a social environment and will give volunteers the change to relax and unwind as well as getting to know volunteers from other schools and what is going on in the different communities. Although the house is available for use at the weekend many volunteers choose to go to nearby Puyo or Banos. All of the schools can easily be accessed either by foot or by bus. A regular bus service also runs to Puyo giving volunteers easy access to internet and local ammenities.
