Internship Description
As a field intern, you will be in a dual role. On the one hand, you will partake in all the activities with the volunteers (e.g. library programming, teaching English lessons, community engagement and so on). But you will also be working in a leadership role. In this capacity, you will have several responsibilities:
- You will organize events for the volunteers to get to know the community (and vice versa).
- You will work with the teachers and administrators in the local schools to increase cooperation and integration between the schools and our library.
- You will work to support the library in its daily operations.
- You will blog about your experiences so that future participants will know more about the experience of an intern in Santa Cruz.
- You will lead the volunteers in the group's efforts to engage the community with the library.
To give you a more concrete sense of what all of this means, here is a list of what some past programming has consisted of:
- Two week summer vacation reading camp for approximately two dozen children.
- Series of after-school/cultural activities at the library, such as movie screenings, arts & crafts, and board games.
- Educational opportunities for adults (e.g. women's book club, reading hour for young mothers)
- Inventory of books, statistics of the library's impact
- After-school English study sessions .
This is a job with a great deal of independence. Don't be intimidated! You will get ample support from previous field interns and the founders of the program. Thus, you will be learning Spanish and integrating into a beautiful community (along with the rest of your group) but you will also be learning valuable skills in leadership and initiative
Qualifications
- Conversational Spanish is absolutely necessary
- Ability to adapt to rural life and live without many amenities (not too rural, but this is a coffee-growing village)
- Strong interpersonal skills, outgoing/friendly personality
- Patience: In Costa Rica, there is less emphasis on efficiency and timeliness than in the U.S. The ability to adapt to a different culture and way of life is important to do this job well
- Experience teaching/working with children helpful but not required
Dates
This is a 9-week summer internship that will run sometime from June to August. You will work with your group of volunteers (and your fellow interns) to set the dates of the trip.
Cost
We ask all volunteers and interns to provide a donation of 200 dollars to the Santa Cruz Public Library to help cover utility expenses, programming costs, and librarian wages. These donations help keep the library open each new year. The only other costs to consider are airfare and 20$ a night for the homestay.
Contact
For more information, contact mcrook13@amherst.edu or astrecker13@amherst.edu (Mari Crook, Alex Strecker, co-presidents of Beyond el Campo).
