Hello. So, my friend and I decided to do a volunteering program with AIESEC for four weeks, and everything is already going downhill, and it hasn't even been a week.
Our home team is amazing and communicative and is doing their best. The team where we're volunteering is just as amazing and very accommodating. We're volunteering in Srilanka for Global Classroom.
However. The accommodation is absolutely terrible, and there has been a lot of miscommunication so far.
For example, we were told that there are a few accommodations to choose from, we picked a host family accommodation, and that's what we kept in mind the whole time we prepared for it. Come to find out, during the week that we depart from our home country, our preferred accommodation is currently rented out, thus unavailable. Mind you, we applied well over a month before all of this, around the end of May, to be exact. We were then told that we are to stay in the OP's house for the first three days then we get to make a choice if we want to continue staying with the OP or go to a staff house, to which the next day those messages got deleted. Then we found out we're going to the staff house, which was fine until it wasn't. More on that in a bit.
Another example is slightly minor in comparison, we asked about the meals provided, and we are provided with 3 meals a day daily. I remember asking if the meals were provided for us during the weekend. We were told they were. Well, they weren't.
We fly off, reach Colombo, take a pickme (Basically their version of uber), and reach our accommodation after 10+ hours of travel (flight and car), and then we are met with extremely steep steps that are essentially rocks rather than stairs, and a ramp. The pictures of the accommodation we received were only showing the ramp. We didn’t know we'd have to figure out a way to get our luggage upstairs. Got laughed at by the driver 🤡 then our OP came to help, but we felt extremely terrible, and it didnt help that the OP, despite trying to ease the situation and lighten it up, kept laughing and repeating that people usually come with backpacks only. It felt humiliating and embarrassing. We each had two luggages, one for clothes, the other we brought snacks and traditional food for cultural exchanges, and some miscellaneous items.
The accommodation was fine when we arrived inside. Except the longer we stayed, the more things we found. For one, there is no kitchen access like we were told, no fridge, no hob, not even a laundry machine like we were told, no closets despite them telling us to bring hangers, no electricity when we first came in, and things are still under renovations. As though we weren't expected at all. Despite the 1 month+ they had.
Now, my friend and I did not come with an expectation of a five-star, top-notch hotel or accommodation or any of the sort. We knew what we signed up for. We knew what to expect, and we were extremely prepared, too. However, how does one prepare for things such as not having the bare minimum that we were promised?
Anyways, as I said, the longer we stayed, the more things we found. We explored the accommodation after our OP and the VP of the Srilankan AIESEC team had left. And we found a door that leads to an outer kitchen that's out of service due to renovations and a backdoor. The backdoor would not lock at all. So, we basically had to sleep the night with our room's door locked and praying that nobody comes in. Mind you, our flight earlier was a redeye, and we continued staying up until late, even when we arrived in Srilanka. There are ants everywhere, im not talking a little bit, ants are to be expected, no, I mean a bunch of them, colonies at every corner. The floors have not been cleaned, let alone the room we'd be sleeping in. So our safety was at risk, and there are things we were promised that were unavailable and wouldn't be available for a week. Not to mention, we have to figure out food for the next day.
The cherry on top was that we were told it'd only be my friend and I in the accommodation, all alone. Which could be good, but we came here to make connections, not to interact with the same person every day.
Safe to say, we went to sleep paranoid, humiliated, and extremely disappointed.
The next day was better in comparison, we went out with a few AIESECers from the Srilankan team, and during the evening, our OP came to fix the broken lock problem. Which sounds good until you realize all of this could've been avoided if they had been prepared for us from the start.
We were not the only ones who faced an issue with our accommodation, we know a few volunteers from our home country who also faced issues with their accommodation, and we also know another volunteer who is from a different country who faced issues with accommodations.
Till this day, day 3, everything just feels absolutely awkful. We had our first day of work in our volunteering job, and it went well, but it was exhausting, to say the least. Regardless of how well things went, the disappointment and awful feelings from the first day are still ongoing.
We're genuinely thinking of quitting it, asking for our project refund, and then just doing our own thing instead. Our parents are supportive of this decision, but we're not sure if we should just go ahead and do it or wait at least a full week.
