The volunteer portion of my trip to Costa Rica was frankly not what I expected. The biggest surprises were:
1. The age of the other volunteers — 18-21
2. The actual volunteer work
To the first point, I am not opposed to hanging out with young adults but it made me feel really old. When conversation turned to beer pong, for example, I felt that my escapades more than a decade prior were a little too dated to share. Plus, I was pregnant so it just seemed dumb to be pipe in about my drinking game prowess (even tho I displayed some major beer pong game Cape Week ’93).
So the “kids” and I were working at FIMRC’s clinic in a slum within San Jose’s “Ring of Poverty.” The clinic provides basic medical care for kids that would ordinarily not been seen by a doctor because their parents are non-legal Nicaraguans. The doctor, a volunteer from the US, and her staff provide compassionate, quality care to this community. I felt that my financial contribution (all volunteers give FIMRC $400 towards the clinic) was money well spent. However, the actual volunteer hours did not feel productive to me. There were too many volunteers and the vast majority of the work was medical — instead of the community outreach that I expected. Other volunteers very much enjoyed the clinic but it wasn’t a great fit for me.
The experience overall was great. Hey, what could I really expect from one week of volunteering? I walked away knowing that in the future I need to look for projects that involve people of various ages in productive, non-medical work.
