TRAVEL | VOLUNTEERING | CARIBBEAN | NEVIS

How We Got a Six-Month Volunteer Gig at a Botanical Garden in the Caribbean

It wasn’t as hard as you might think.

It has become obvious to me that some people hear of other people doing these sorts of things but they don’t think that they can. In fact, before my partner and I set out on our full-time travel journey in 2017, we were also told that we would never find any sort of volunteer opportunity while out in the world. Well, more specifically, this individual told us that we would never get a housesitting job. In fact, he told us that it was impossible.

However, after joining a housesitting website while we were downsizing and getting rid of all of our possessions, I was amazed that less than one month later, a lady contacted us to see if we wanted to housesit for her in Costa Rica later that year. Thus began our nomadic journey.

Defying impossibility, we house-sat in 4 different locations around Central America before we made our way to the Caribbean for a family holiday. By then we had lived in Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Guatemala.

It was February of 2019 and it was my mom's 70th birthday. We had arranged to meet my parents in the US and British Virgin Islands to celebrate. Instead of booking a return flight to Guatemala, we decided to book a one-way ticket. We had thoughts of trying to get on a sailboat as a crew and sail back to Guatemala. You see, we had left a suitcase with some friends there, so we needed to go back at some point.

We left it there because we knew that trying to drag a bunch of luggage around in the Caribbean would be taxing. Plus we were staying on a boat for part of the trip, and storage is usually pretty small in these situations. We didn’t want to be burdened by our stuff. Mostly, the suitcase contained art supplies and warm-weather clothes. Plus we left our kitchen kit and other things that we didn’t think we would need while on a literal holiday.

The holiday consisted of a week sailing on a catamaran in the British Virgin Islands, then a week on shore in a hotel on the island of St. John, US Virgin Islands. We arrived not knowing what we were going to do next, but we were confident that we would find a solution in the two weeks that we had arranged to be there. If all else failed, we would simply book a flight back to Guatemala.

Just two days into our sailing trip, a notification came through on a housesitting platform that we are on called Housecarers.com. There looked to be a house-sit on the island of Nevis, which is part of the country St. Kitts & Nevis. The posting said that there was a house and some animals to care for.

I had never seen any housesitting opportunities in the Caribbean come up on the platform before. Here we were, just a few islands away and it truly felt like the universe was conspiring to help us out once again.

I immediately replied to the posting and told the lady that we were certainly interested in going there to housesit. The length of the sit wasn’t clear, but as full-time travelers, we had nowhere to be anyways. Our only item on our agenda was to return to Guatemala at some point to retrieve our suitcase.

The owner got back to us straight away saying that there was a bit more to do than housesitting and that she would send me the details as soon as possible.

A day later I received a message:

Hi Jill and Chris,

I am very open to talking with you further!

I am having a crazy couple of days however, so please bear with me while I get through it. I will be in touch. Meanwhile, if you want to know more about me and what I do, please check out the Botanical Gardens of Nevis website and our Facebook and Tripadvisor pages.

I was intrigued. This certainly didn’t sound like a normal housesit. A botanical garden! Ooh lala! As avid gardeners, our interest was piqued.

Of course, I immediately took a look at the website and learned about this magical place. We still didn’t exactly know what it had to do with our housesitting job, but we were excited nonetheless.

A day or so later, she sent a longer message. The gist of it was that we weren’t only required to housesit, the owner needed volunteers in her botanical garden as well. She told us that she was mostly looking for people who could commit long-term, upwards of 6 months. I told her that it was certainly possible. Though we would miss our art supplies for that long, we were keen to have this experience.

There was a bit of a catch, though. The owner didn’t need us until the end of the month. It was now the beginning of February, and with our holiday ending on February 10th, we knew that we needed to get somewhere cheaper than the USVI to wait out the time required. We found a cheap flight and decided to fly to Puerto Rico to see what we could find. From there we could fly direct to Nevis when the time came.

We didn’t have accommodation booked when we arrived, but after speaking to a lady in the tourist office at the airport, she directed us to a cheap hotel in Old San Juan. We immediately fell in love with this area of the city. We were within walking distance of supermarkets, eateries, beaches, and adorable cobblestone streets that we would explore for hours.

Plus we weren’t that far from the famous Castillo San Felipe del Morro — San Juan's fortress that sits prominently at the entrance to the harbor.

We enjoyed the area so much that we decided to just stay there for the duration of our time in Puerto Rico. Of course, now I regret not exploring a bit, but at the time we were content with just sitting still and working on our online projects.

It wasn’t until we finally flew to Nevis and arrived to our housesit/volunteer job that we realized how amazing this opportunity was. However, we soon learned that the owner was a little tricky to deal with, and we arrived to a bunch of disgruntled volunteers who were fed up and couldn’t wait to be finished with their commitments. The first night was spent around the fire with them while they all complained and belly ached about what a pain she was. However, we would not be deterred.

As the other volunteers left, one by one, throughout the next couple of weeks, we persevered. We loved the opportunity to be living in the Caribbean and thoroughly enjoyed our time in the garden. All of this trumped any annoyances we had to put up with from her.

Each day started with us raking and sweeping the pathways. While others hated this part of the day, we simply loved being amongst the plants and we appreciated the physical aspect of the job. We had been lounging around for a while and hadn’t been getting any real exercise — this was our chance to get back into shape.

After all the other volunteers left, the garden owner called us into her office one day. It was then that she told us how much she appreciated our work ethic and she wanted to sweeten the deal even further for us. She told us that we could take the company truck home with us that day and keep it for our personal use (the other volunteers had to walk to the garden each day), plus she would pay us $1000 per month if we committed to staying for another 5.5 months. Of course, we agreed to this arrangement.

Staying in one place for this amount of time means that we truly got a taste of life in the Caribbean. Of course, each island nation has its own culture and differing foods, but we got a general sense of life down there.

While the owner was sometimes difficult to deal with, by focusing on the good parts of our ‘volunteer’ gig, we really enjoyed our time spent in the garden. Plus, as a bonus, she sent us to her property on the island of Anguilla for a couple of weeks as a thank-you for our hard work.

With this experience under our belts, we knew that finding volunteer jobs was not that hard after all. In fact, we are now members of a platform called HelpX which grants us access to thousands of volunteer gigs from around the world. Traveling in this way truly helps us to learn so much more about the cultures and people that live in the places we find ourselves and I highly recommend trying it for anyone who has a thirst to dig down and learn more about a place than just the typical tourist stuff.

More articles from our Nevis experience:

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