My internship in AWF !!

The Atlantic Whale Foundation is a non-profit charity volunteer run organisation. Its operating base is in Tenerife and its trustee/co-founder/operations director is Ed Bentham. The AWF was founded in London in 1995. Aside from its main whale and dolphin program in Tenerife, it also has many other projects around the world, dealing not just with wildlife conservation, but also with humanitarian work, teaching and restoration programs. This includes places such as Sri Lanka and Sierra Leone. The AWF motto is “The responsibility to defend nature belongs to each of us – as individuals”. The AWF is funded mostly by its volunteers and public donations and fundraising. The operating base is located in a small mountain village called Arona. All the AWF projects in Tenerife and around the world are run and coordinated from here.

The core volunteer program in Tenerife operates predominantly on the whale watching boats. These are based in the ports of Los Gigantes, Puerto Colon, Las Galletas and Los Cristianos. The volunteers, in pairs, go onto the whale watching boats as ‘Research Guides’. This allows us to research the whales and dolphins when we see them and record information on them on data sheets that we’re given beforehand to fill in. Each time a group of whales or dolphins are seen it is called an ‘interaction’. We also hand round a petition against whaling for the tourists to sign if they want to. This is to help raise awareness for whaling which still continues in places like Japan and Norway. Then when we get home in the evenings having normally done two boat trips, we enter all our data onto the computer and send it off to the main database. We also enter all the signed petitions into a special website for the anti-whaling petitions.

Due to the number of volunteers, we cannot go on the whale watching boats every day. So we are given projects to do when we are in the house so that we can contribute to the AWF projects by choosing aspects that best suit our skills and interests. I chose a trading project to do something close to my studies. In this project I have to work on the marketing and to find about solutions to sell some products from the Atlantic Whale Foundation, then it can get money for the different projects.

There were several different team projects set up while we were there. These included a fundraising team, a trade team which I was part of, a graphics team and also a brand new rib project.

The house of volunteers feels very much like a family. There are people from many different countries coming in and out and it’s always great to meet them and hear their backgrounds and interests and we all became good friends in no time. Every morning we are all given a room to clean before the start of the day so that the house is kept clean and tidy. Two people are assigned to cook and clean up each day as well. So it’s very much a team effort to run the house. There is also a lovely lady called Teresa who helps with the cooking and cleaning and running the house in general. She is much loved by all the volunteers.