Sidebar #54 - What Do Volunteers Do Over Summer Break?

As my school year finishes this week in Costa Rica, I figured how volunteers spend their “summers” might be a pertinent question. Since Peace Corps volunteers in Youth Development and English Education follow the academic calendar, that means we have roughly 2 months of “Summer” in which there aren’t activities in which we are required to do. Peace Corps volunteers don’t submit work hours or anything, so technically, there is nothing stopping a volunteer from taking these couple months almost completely off and unwinding. And, in reality, many of us will take a step back and recover a bit during the school break. Accordingly, this is a time in which many volunteers will use their vacation days to travel abroad or back home since we don’t have firm commitments at school. However, we are here to serve, and I think most volunteers are intrinsically motivated enough that we don’t want to take these months completely off either. Service is only 2 years, and we don’t want 2 months of that to go to waste. With the added free time, volunteers will implement summer camps or community-based projects that fall outside of the public school environment. Others may focus on lesson planning for the next year or reporting the previous year’s data to Peace Corps. In my case, I am co-planning a sports camp in the rural community of a fellow Peace Corps volunteer who works in the economic sector. I will also use the break to travel home for Christmas and abroad to Panama. 




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