I spent three months volunteering with Volunteer Bolivia  . It wassometimes annoying, scary and difficult, but also life-changing, satisfying and amazing. Because I had studied Spanish for a couple of years before I went out, I had just one week of classes at Volunteer Bolivia. Living with a family also helped my Spanish greatly and l felt immediately like one of their daughters. We were good friends from the beginning of my time there and I was looked after very well. I still had a lot of independence. The Volunteer Bolivia centre, with its cafe bar and cultural talks, was a meeting place for all the volunteers and I met some wonderful people from all over the world who were doing the same as me-giving something of themselves to a country which needs so much. My job was in a caring centre for prisoners' children from the Cochabamba prisons and from the very  start I felt welcomed and needed. There I met some inspiring members who put so much of their heart into caring for those children who maybe had no one else to love them. Not only the work itself was very hard but at times it was emotionally demanding, especially sending a group of two-year-olds back into the prison at the end of the day. Despite all this, I learnt a lot through the experience and now I'm more aware of the problems faced daily by many people in South America. The centre has very limited funding c) so they depend heavily on the work of volunteers, and any time people give is very valuable to them. Since returning to Britain I have kept in touch with the people I worked with and I'm trying to support them as much as possible. Volunteering through Volunteer Bolivia has changed my life and is an experience l will never forget. The author's job as a volunteer in Bolivia was to
raise money for some prisons meet volunteers from other countries look after some prisoners' children help the local people with their farm work