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Global Vision International (GVI) is an ethical volunteering organisation working in partnership with over 150 critical conservation and humanitarian projects worldwide. With staff in 30 countries and thousands of ex-volunteers there are many different stories to tell. This news section gives a brief overview of how you can find out more about GVI, its work and its people, and gives you a sample of some clippings from the international press.
Work with turtles on the happiest place on earth
15 January 2007Ethical volunteering organisation Global Vision International (GVI) has launched a unique holiday which allows members of the public to help preserve rare turtles on the remote Pacific islands of Vanuatu – officially the world’s happiest place.
In Vanuatu a grassroots effort to stop the decline in turtles, currently endangered by the trade for their eggs, shells and meat, has sprouted up in rural communities across the country. Locals have created the Vanua-Tai (meaning of land and sea) Natural Resource Monitors – a national network of community members that are working within their communities to institute bans on the harvest of turtles and their eggs.
Working closely with the island’s locals, the ni-Vanuatu, GVI volunteers will take part in the first nesting survey, designed to protect the population of sea-turtles. All scientific data collected on this project will remain the property of the Vanua-Tai. Volunteers will also get to teach at the village school, learn to cook local food, and generally become a part of the local community whilst staying in a ‘bush bungalow’, built specially by local villagers.
GVI’s representative in the Southern Hemisphere, Erica Louise, said: “This is one of the most exciting new projects GVI has been involved in for a long while. Not only will volunteers be able to help an endangered species, but they will be able to be genuinely integrated in a local community in the best possible way – as equals, not colonialists.”
First visited by European explorers in the seventeenth century, and by Captain James Cook in the eighteenth, many of the 83 islands of Vanuatu have been inhabited for thousands of years. 65% of the population live a subsistence lifestyle, farming or fishing their own food. In 2006 the New Economics Foundation placed the archipelago top of its Happy Planet Index, meaning that residents have the greatest combined life satisfaction, life expectancy and smallest ecological footprint of any of the world’s nations.
Volunteers must be able to work as part of a team and have a strong interest in wildlife and conservation. Participants must be fit, patient, flexible and eager to learn.
