Fiji

I volunteered to teach English for one month om Nadi, Fiji. This was my first abroad experience. Overall I can say that I am glad that I went with PA. My placement, accomocdation and support were top notch. Even the gatherings where you meet with other volunteers was good. They doa good job of ensuring that you are happy with not only your placement but your living situation as well. I had the best host family ever. They keo the home immaculate and ensured that I never missed a meal. Always provided me with nutritious and tasty menu items. From what i gather this program was one of the more expensive ones. However, if its your first time out I highly recommend you go through PA.

Hello all,
I spent six weeks in Fiji with Madventurer volunteering in a primary school. It was a good experience and the staff were great. A downside was it was coming to the end of the season so the Mad house wasn't as full as it had been previously. But the crew members living there made it a good experience all the same and helped me to book a weeks trip 'island hopping' around the other Fijian islands. I am now back home and am completing an assignment on the company for university. If anyone has any exeperiences of this company and would like to tell me about them and answer a few queations, please email me on kelly_mcpherson1@hotmail.com.
Thanks

I completed 2 projects with them. The communication between London and the field was really really bad. For example we were told to pay diving deposites in pounds by the london office, but when we arrived in the field they wanted them in dollars.
When I arrived in Livingstone, Zambia where I was meant to be met at the airport and transfered by frontier staff to Namibia no one was there. I was left at the airport with no idea where I was meant to go and ended up staying in a backpackers hostel for 3 days (which I had to pay for myself) before I heard from Frontier field staff (and only then because my parents in the UK were phoning their London office several times a day for me).
Most of the project cost money I paid didn't make it into the host contry - for the Fiji marine project we worked out as a volunteer group we had paid over £85k to be there and yet the project staff said the budget for our time there that they had been given from London HQ was only £5k. They claim to be non profit but effectivly they are not as they pay loads to another company (thats for profit) owned by the same people as Frontier for marketing services. See the facebook group: "Frontier Charity? No." for links to some websites questioning their status.
There were many other problems I experienced with them. Such as the compressor wasn't maintained and broke twice so we lost almost 2 weeks of diving as we couldn't fill the tanks.
DO NOT GO WITH THEM. There are far better organisations that run projects similar to frontier out there.

This seemed like the trip of a lifetime but Frontier were awful. The location and camp were great but the boats didn't work, we ran out of water and the staff members had to punt round to the next village (which took them about 4 hours) to get some, we ran out of fuel and only one of the compressors worked (to fill up the tanks to dive) and that broke down fairly often too. one of our huts was burnt down when people were in it. People got quite ill due to the poor nutrition as well. Once we returned to the mainland that was it too, no help, advice or support until you went home or carried on travelling. We were effectively abandonned at the harbour. I recommend travelling, just not with this company.