You will face many problems and challenges

Hello everyone

I am Guillermo from Costa Rica. I went to Brazil I have to tell you that it has been one of the best experiences of my life.

My project in Brazil was Child Aid and I was assigned to a small village by the name of Jurema that is about an hour away from Quijingue where Humana People to People have their office.
Jurema is one of the poorest communities on this area of Brazil but never the less people were kind and welcome me with open arms since the beginning of my months working among them.

My work consisted in choosing twelve families in these community and work with them in different projects like construction, latrine building, vegetable gardens, education as well as helping them in any other daily activity, were they needed an extra hand, like sheep and goat herding, bean picking or even carrying water to their houses.
 During my time in Brazil it was also my responsibility as a volunteer to develop activities in which all the community can get involve and because of this we started English and Spanish classes were about 30 people participated twice a week for the 4 month period as well as two "Community Actions" in which the kids and adults of Jurema got a chance to play games, win prices, get hair cuts, watch movies and also did some cleaning of the streets and common areas of Jurema so basically we give them a space for them to share together activities as a community.

As my time in Brazil finished I started to realize how much I learned about the world, about poverty and about myself and how many things that for some of us are common and unimportant, for some others, those small things are everything they wish for and how sometimes we forget what is really important in this world and in our lives.

After being close to poverty just for a short period of time you appreciate much more everything around you and believe it or not you start to experience the world in a different way, you look at what you have and you give the deserve importance to everything in your life.

So for everyone that is considering a similar experience just remember that is going to be tough and at some point can get overwhelming, that living in small poor communities around the world is difficult and you will face many problems, many challenges but at the end you will get a bigger reward that only this experience can give you…….... in my case it was humility.

Guillermo Villalobos, Costa Rica