What you can do in Brazil

Caring Projects in Brazil

You can volunteer for a caring placements in Brazil in day centres.   These volunteer placements are usually run in two sessions daily with a substantial mid-day meal in between, which volunteers may have to help serve. They are often specifically for schoolchildren, who can only attend school for half a day in Brazil. To keep them off the streets and out of harm, many projects, some run by religious organisations and some by local authorities, offer activities and help with school work. These projects are well organised and volunteer activities often take place in quite formal classrooms. 

Volunteer men are particularly welcome in these projects as so many children have absent or abusive fathers. They badly need role models for normal masculine behaviour. 

The biggest contribution volunteers can make is to the self-confidence and self-esteem of these children. They know they are the bottom of the heap, the dregs of society, and some have already given up hope. They are desperate for affection, for hugs and human contact, real attention, someone to listen to them and to treat them as an individual. Volunteers can give them a sense of achievement, by showing them they can succeed at things. Volunteers can encourage them to have ambitions, to want to learn and to succeed. No child should feel as one ten year old did, that he has no future and is worthless. If volunteering can change this then volunteers are helping to save the future of Brazil, and they will find this the most rewarding thing they have ever done.

Community Projects in Brazil

Volunteer community projects can be very rewarding if you like working with people. They are often attached to a church or mission, and the aim is to improve the life of the community by teaching them skills and offering enjoyable activities.  Our volunteers work with a number of communities to help them in ways that they have identified they need, in a variety of situations.  Volunteers might be involved in any number of activities from IT to music, from basic health and hygiene to gardening.  Our volunteers may be working in a women’s project, teaching them skills so that they can make extra income and thereby educate and feed their children.  Help with sports is always welcome, though facilities are often not easy to come by.  Volunteers can set up a sewing circle, run an English conversation club, give painting lessons and take groups to a local art gallery, give cookery demonstrations of English food – your imagination is the limit.

Volunteers will have lots of support from the resident team, and will be a part of the local community. A volunteer's contribution will never be forgotten in Brazil, and they will feel they have made a real difference to countless lives.

Environmental Projects in Brazil

The volunteer work in environmental projects in Brazil can vary from teaching English to eco-guides to replanting the Atlantic Rain Forest. Most volunteer projects involve quite heavy and often repetitive work, clearing trails, placing signposts, digging water holes to keep wildlife in a protected area where they can’t be hunted, potting up hundreds of seedlings of forest trees and later planting them out into their permanent homes. Not a lot of time will be spent saving turtles (though some may be) or caring for wild life.

There is a need for volunteers to teach school children to respect their environment and a need for those volunteers with reasonable IT skills to either teach them or help update information and websites. The Atlantic Rain Forest has been reduced to a fragment of its former self, and many people are trying to re-connect areas of forest by planting corridors of trees between them, so that the plants and animals can be reconnect along these wildlife corridents and their gene pools be reinvigorated. There are also volunteer placements in projects promoting sustainable living, following the principle of permaculture where volunteers will be involved in a wide variety of tasks from constructing buildings, to animal husbandry, to tending the vegetable garden, to guiding English speaking visitors to maybe building water gardens or playgrounds or whatever may be needed.

It may be possible to work in more than one project so that you can experience some of the different environments of Brazil.

Conditions in environmental volunteer projects may be quite primitive, mosquitoes will be endemic, but you will be working amid beautiful scenery often in unspoiled countryside and if you care about the environment this may be the job for you.  

Teaching Projects in Brazil

As a volunteer, English teaching in Brazil will give you an amazing new perspective on this incredible country. Volunteers can gain invaluable work and life experience abroad without any previous qualifications, and they are not required to have undergone TEFL training, although it is possible to take one of our in-house courses. Whether you are coming to volunteer abroad on a career break, an extended vacation, during your gap year or after university, you will have a role to play in one of the schools or projects that we work with, and you will be able to make a real difference by volunteering in Brazil.

Volunteers may be in a state school (private schools don’t need our help) or may be teaching as part of a caring placement. Wherever you are, your contribution is going to offer children the chance to escape from the prospect of a lifetime of unemployment, or dead end part time jobs. If volunteering in a day centre for deprived children you could make the difference between a short brutal life as a drug pusher or the chance of a steady job in tourism, hotels, restaurants, maybe even in an office or as an eco-guide.

English teachers in Brazil have often never been to an English speaking country. Some may never have met a native English speaker. English is rarely spoken in the classroom, and when it is, the pronunciation is sometimes barely intelligible. So don’t worry if you don’t know how to teach English grammar; you are there as a volunteer to help them learn the ordinary everyday English that you speak at home or with your friends.

Volunteer teaching is a really worthwhile option, and you will get great satisfaction from it. It will be an overseas experience you never forget!