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Volunteering: How to find the best fits
As an administrator of volunteers, I have spoken with thousands of interested volunteers and interviewed hundreds of potential volunteers.
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Tours with duty
Lying on a beach and sipping margaritas is no longer enough to satisfy world travelers. Instead many people are opting for spend their vacation time volunteering.
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By Michelle Garcia
Lying on a beach and sipping margaritas is no longer enough to satisfy world travelers. Instead many people are opting for spend their vacation time volunteering.
"Volunteering is more prominent than it used to be," says Karen Moore, Sales and Development Manager for International Programs at Travel CUTS, pointing out that in Ontario you need to volunteer for at least 40 hours to graduate high school. "And a lot of people have already traveled," she adds, "They've already done the beach holiday."
The trend has grown so much that travel agencies and websites are beginning to cater more to these needs. Volunteering and volutourism have become more of a focus at Travel CUTS; an entire section of their site is devoted to these types of trips. The American site http://cheaptickets.com has recently launched a Volunteer Vacations section as well.
Flo Williams, a retired nurse, spent a couple of weeks volunteering last November at a makeshift clinic in a small village about 100 km away from the city of San Pedro Sula in Honduras. The temporary clinic staffed by a group of North American doctors, nurses and other volunteers provided services for people living nearby.
Christie Maltman, manager of a Toronto store on the other had planned a similar vacation. Though her trip plans included helping at a local school in Namibia, rather than spend her entire two weeks there the volunteering part was only to last for a few days, while the remainder of the trip was spent touring, like a more traditional vacation. Though the volunteering aspect was important to her, so was the tourist part, "I wanted to make sure I got to see everything," she says. In fact the tourist part of her vacation became the only part of it as she was not able to fulfill her volunteering due to unforeseen time restraints.
While the two types of trips differ, planning for them is similar in many ways. First there are the basics you have to decide: Where do you want to go? And what do you want to do? Brandon Wick, Senior Manager, Communications at Cross-Cultural Solutions an organization that helps travelers arrange their volunteer vacations says most people know the answer to at least one of these questions. "A little more than half of the people we deal with have a destination in mind," Wick explains and the other half have an idea of what type of volunteering they want to do.
For Williams who is a registered nurse what she wanted to do was obvious. But for most people it isn't, so it's a good idea to make a list of skills and interests, similar to a resume, to use as a guideline. In some cases no previous skills are required at all, Williams recalls that some of the volunteers at their clinic were just general helpers, "If drugs were needed they would go and get them," she recalls, "they did not have a medical background."
Regardless of how long you will be volunteering you'll need to ask yourself what the website http://www.volutourism.org calls "The Difficult Questions". Do you require accommodations that have running water? Are you comfortable staying in the home of a local? In a hostel? What tolerance do you have for extreme climate? Or exposure to deprivation, poverty, starvation, health issues etc.?
Currently there are dozens of organizations that offer services to help, choose, organize and set up volunteer opportunities.
An organization like Cross Cultural Solutions caters to a broad range of potential volunteers from students to retirees with programs in 12 different countries and opportunities to do everything from health care to teaching. Other organizations focus on a specific type of volunteer. For example, Canada World Youth only takes volunteers between 17-24 years while an organization like Earthwatch Institute focuses on expeditions that involve work with the environment including working with endangered species and researching biodiversity.
For voluntourism opportunities that combine tourism with volunteering more traditional travel agencies like Trek Escapes or GAP adventures can help plan both portions of the trip.
Regardless of the length of your overseas volunteering there can be many benefits. Firstly this type of travel gives you maximum exposure to a different culture letting you into areas of a country not many tourists get to see, "it makes people really value cultures other than their own," Wick observes.
It also allows you to use your skills in a way you'd never imagined. At the Honduras clinic, Williams dealt primarily with people suffering from malnutrition, dehydration and infections, illnesses she didn't deal with too often at a Canadian hospital. "I was very overwhelmed with what I had to do," she explained referring to the fact that she and her colleagues had to diagnose patients just by looking at them and talking to them about their medical histories, without the aid of the sophisticated tools they were used to using in Canada like x-rays or MRI machines. "But I think we helped them and improved their lives, if only temporarily."
And of course there is the satisfaction in knowing that you could touch the lives of people so far away, "They're so patient and humble and so grateful for any attention," Williams recalls, "I think they would remember for a long time the attention we'd given them and the care that we showed."
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