Volunteer In Exchange For Free Hotel and Meals

Do you like meeting people from other countries? Would you like to volunteer in exchange for free hotel and meals?

If so, Vaughan Town may be the ideal solution for you. There you get to help Spanish people improve their English for one week.

You meet 15 Anglos and 15 Spaniards for one week in a beautiful countryside hotel, all for free, but more importantly, you get to learn about other cultures.

This is my second year of volunteering and I made new friends. (Here was last year’s experience in another location.)

You truly bond, and develop friendships after sharing one week together, and you’ll want to do it again. One American, HJ, from Georgia, has volunteered nineteen times. He’s in his 70s, and has so much energy and enthusiasm to share with everyone. The poor Spaniards had trouble understanding his accent, but he won them over with his personality.

So what do you do during your week?

• First you meet your fellow Anglos, who have signed up as volunteers, for cocktails at the Eurobuilding 2--headquarters to Vaughan Town School–in Madrid, on the Saturday evening before the program starts.
• You leave on Sunday morning by bus to one of the locations you have selected to volunteer at. I chose Pedraza, this year. A 13th Century village in Segovia.

Watch my quick morning walk to the town square.

 

• You meet the Spaniards on the course at the bus in front of Eurobuilding 2
• Each Anglo has to sit next to a Spaniard, and your one-to-one conversation begins.
• It takes one and a half hours to get to Pedraza from Madrid.
• At the hotel, you settle into your room and have lunch and Marisa (our program organizer) has a schedule set our for your daily meals, (you get to choose each course) and the program of the day.
• During your scheduled one-to-ones, you speak to a Spaniard, (English only) and you can either walk around town, go to the local cafe in the old town square, or stay in the hotel lobby.
• There is of course siesta time after lunch, until 5 p.m.
• After your siesta, you start your English conversation again;, either one-to-ones, conference calls (to help Spaniards practice speaking on the phone) or practice presentations or plays for the evening entertainment.
• Entertainment starts at 8 p.m.

Watch the Vaughan Town entertainers in the video below.

• Dinner at 9 p.m.
• Games, drinks at the bar, dancing, and staying up all night if you’re under 35-year-old.

A wonderful experience, and I got some amazing tips about other places and things to do from fellow Anglos. More on that in other blog posts to follow.

Any questions? Feel free to ask in the comments section.