Mar de Jade, Las Varas, Nayarit

While vacationing and studying Spanish at Mar de Jade in Nayarit you can help others in local community service. Financial assistance and much staff time go toward the Mar de Jade-founded medical clinic and other community projects such as scholarships for local students, cottage industries, and an afternoon program for children.

Mar de Jade is currently involved in a community-wide effort in the farming town of Las Varas, Nayarit to help families in extreme economic distress.

Las Varas, fifteen minutes inland from Chacala, is the largest town in the area with a population of 16,000. Almost half of the working people of Las Varas are landless farmers who are employed from crop to crop about five months of the year and earn an equivalent of USD 6.00 per day.

The inflation rate in Mexico has made food and other basic products in Mexico as expensive as they are in the U.S. This has forced many men in town to migrate in search of work, leaving their wives to manage households of aging parents and young children, with practically no financial resources.

To help these families, a community group assisted by Mar de Jade is providing various services, including health care, legal assistance, a young children’s after school program, English classes. The clinic has been home to a women’s sewing coop and to a kitchen that feeds kids and their mothers a high protein meal three times a week. All of these activities present many opportunities to help out. In the process you will be interacting with a community that is probably quite different from what you know and you will be practicing your Spanish as well.

Few residents of the town of Chacala have the resources to go off to a city and learn a profession. Girls in particular need to know there is an alternative to marriage and a way to participate in the support of the family. Mar de Jade helps parents and adolescents as well as grandparents to obtain a working knowledge of a home-based industry which could supplement the fishing, farming and tourism activities of the village.

Mar de Jade has trained local village women in the art of massage and employs them at guests' request and also carries out small scale organic home gardening projects. Any home-based skills that volunteer guests can teach would be a welcome addition to the current community volunteer program.

Volunteering in the various projects varies depending on time of the year and is arranged on an individual basis. In order to register please contact us indicating your skills and experience that might help us place you in the appropriate volunteer activity. Please remember that the type of volunteer project you might be interested in might not be available at the dates you have chosen.

Grupo Ecológico de la Costa Verde

In 1993 the Grupo Ecológico de la Costa Verde received official recognition by the Mexican Government to become the first environmental non-profit civil association of the region with the special interest in the protection of the marine turtle.

The object of the Association that today is formed is the protection of the environment along the Green Coast, with special interest inprotecting the Turtles.

They work to develop and establish programs of environment education for the community and visitors, gathering ecological information and share it with other ecological groups and government, improving the development of the communities that inhabits in this coast. As well as the undertaking of all appropriated acts that are necessary for the entire execution of the purpose of this association.