El Nido is located on the western most island, Palawan, of the Philippines. It sits very near the top of the island and is the name of the municipality as well as a town. You have to make an effort to get there, if sitting in a cramped van for 5 hours is effort, but it […]
The final collection of photos from my time on Bohol is a series of photos I took during my time off. Basically Sundays, we worked the other six days of the week. Bohol is ‘famous’ for it’s chocolate hills and tarsiers, neither of which you will see in the photos below! You can see more […]
This second gallery of photos from my time on Bohol is of a ‘Kids Day that All Hands Volunteers organised. This was what we in the UK would call a school fete or fair. It was in a nearby village that had been badly affected by the earthquake, evident by people still leaving in ShelterbBoxes which […]
Bohol is a smallish island in the southern area of the Visayas region of the Philippines. I was there during February 2014 to volunteer with a charity, All Hands Volunteers. The local communities suffered a lot of damage to buildings during an earthquake in October 2013. All Hands were assisting by providing volunteer labour to […]
I thought it would be a good idea to collate all the videos I took whilst volunteering in the Philippines in to one post so you can view them all together. Because I had very slow internet and wanted to upload them whilst I was there they are all low resolution videos and all short, […]
I’ve wanted to write a post to summarise my thoughts, since I finished the volunteering. Every time I think to do it I get slightly overwhelmed by the number of memories that come rushing into my head. When I left the island by ferry on my own; as it pulled away from the dock and […]
I often think of situations from a different angle once they aren’t new anymore. It can be the simplest thing, like the weather changing, that creates a new perspective. Or maybe It’s just settling in to a routine that allows me more brain power to consider how I feel about the environment I’m in. As […]
I knew it had been raining a lot here in Bohol but I wasn’t prepared for the storm that came through the first night. We were offered space inside to sleep due to the concern of camping with the expected wind speeds of 100km/h. I don’t know if the wind was at that speed but […]
Getting Hands On. I’ve never really done any volunteering before, not sure bob-a-job counts (born in the seventies, grew up in the eighties…). I’ve looked for opportunities in the last few years, didn’t find anything that matched up to what I wanted to do and VSO turned me down . Then a friend of mine, Shano (he’s Australian, […]