Pam Grout - The 100 Best Volunteer Vacations to Enrich Your Life

north america & the caribbean

central & south america

europe

middle east

africa

asia

australia & around

C all it the Al Gore Factor, the Katrina Effect, or simply the impulse to have an authentic experience not listed in a typical brochure, but more and more people are combining volunteering with traveling. And its not just high-profile celebrities like George Clooney, Angelina Jolie, and Hilary Swankwho went to Palampur, India, to teach at an orphanage after her 2006 divorcewho are abandoning their bubble of luxury to lend assistance to folks in developing countries.

According to a 2008 survey by the University of California, San Diego, 40 percent of Americans would like to volunteer while on vacation, and another 13 percent are ready to devote an entire year to hopping on a plane and providing goodwill.

The reasons for wanting to volunteer vary. Some do it to gain experience, to add some heft to the old resum. Others want to test themselves or to act out a fantasy. Still others are tired of waiting for their government to act. They want to stand up and be counted. Now.

But the thing all volunteer vacations share? They shed light. They give us a more realistic picture of the world. Suffice it to say, the nightly news does not provide an accurate lens through which to view our planet. Most news reports are one reporters opinion, a sliver of life that one cameraman stumbled onto and captured in one four-minute time slot.

Even people who travelpeople who have ticked off, say, the Taj Mahal and the Arc de Triomphe on their life listsdont always have a realistic vantage point. Fancy hotel chains have set up mini-Americas all over the world. You can go to Costa Rica and check into the San Jos Marriott without ever realizing that the kids in the village down the road play soccer with plastic bags they tied together. You can follow the bellman into your suite at the Four Seasons Hotel Mumbai without it occurring to you that his six kids could eat for a long time on what youll be paying for room service.

With the vacations in this book, youll leave that plastic state of mind behind. Youll see a country for what it really is, neither a sound bite or a statistic of those who died in the last tragedy. Youll get to know real people. Youll work beside them, share their struggles, learn what it feels like to live in a village where no men are over 50, and experience what its like to be invisible to outsiders.

Pillow menus are fun and all, but they dont hold a candle to meeting people like Termana, Indrah, and Bu Mayan, who are putting together a Balinese literary journal. Hotel perks like carsitters and personal fireworks shows sound impressive, but pale in comparison to the satisfaction received from singing Itsy Bitsy Spider to Gwani, a five-year-old Nigerian who just lost her mother to AIDS.

Which brings us back to that light we promised to shed. If you decide to take a volunteer vacation, you can let go of nearly all your preconceived notions, suppositions, and assumptions. This idea that you, noble person that you are, are volunteering in order to swoop in and save the so-called poor unfortunates? Kiss it good-bye.

Ask any seasoned volunteer. People in developing countries have a depth of joy, a richness to which those of us consumed with material things are often blind. The question persists: Who ends up getting helped the most when you travel to help others?

In fact, if you really want to save the day, your best bet is to show up, shut your mouth, and listen to and learn from the people you meet on your journey. Find out the truth behind the sound bites and then go home and spread the word. Effective volunteers often end up making a bigger difference back home than they did in their short time spent volunteering.