Discovering cultural differences, seeing the damage caused by deforestation, poaching and climate change, and understanding the causes of these, are eye opening moments for young minds. They may have the opportunity to meet and play with local children, and will see that there’s more to life than Facebook and phones – as well as learning to be more appreciative of what they do have. A shy child’s confidence will be enormously boosted, and for older kids, volunteering may even change their outlook on their future careers. But there will also be huge doses of fun each day – how can you not enjoy bathing an elephant, or watching a turtle hatchling scamper across the sand for the first and last time before starting his long, long life in the ocean?

Families can work with wild animals too – particularly in Costa Rica, where several species of endangered sea turtles nest on the tropical beaches. Children and adults will enjoy the barefoot beach patrols as they monitor nests, protect hatchings and record observations during the nighttime nesting.

Ellie Petrie, from our supplier Pod Volunteer: “Our horse rehabilitation project accepts families. It’s a lovely project as you can really get involved in the family environment that they have there. It’s run by two women originally from Gloucestershire, then they moved over there and set up the project about 20 years ago now. The volunteers get involved with helping out with the horses and helping with the rehabilitation of an individual horse if they’re there for over four weeks. But while they’re there, they get involved in the local community, in whatever the family’s doing, and just mucking in wherever they can. So it’s really nice for families to go along and help in all the aspects. We have different minimum ages for each project, and for that project there’s a minimum age of 12.