During my 3 months in Oaxaca, Mexico, I worked with "Adolescentes En El Camino" - a youth shelter for central-american migrants with the aim of aiding with the kids' legal procedures and providing a safe shelter for rehabilitation. It was an incredibly interesting project because the founders had a huge amount of freedom and a vision for a more human way of rehabilitating.

I will forever be amazed at how open and vulnerable many volunteers made themselves in order to build trust with the kids who, coming from incredibly violent places, found it hard to be the same with anyone else. Most of the kids stayed at this shelter for about 6 months, and during this time we saw significant improvements in the kids' ability to trust others, and their ability to control their alcohol and marijuana addictions. Even the subtlest changes were massive changes - hugging, laughing, helping, and genuinely caring for the volunteers as if we were family.

In July 2016 the shelter was sadly closed due to a dispute with the parent-organisation over how the shelter should be run. It would be interesting to see if such a project could ever work in more Western countries.