Volunteering to help others in faraway places is an increasingly popular vacation option, in which you can combine your zest for travel with the desire to do good.
TAKE THE ALTRUISM EXPRESS
Nice as it was, Pat Carnright's cruise to Alaska two years ago just wasn't quite enough. "It's so much more fun to go and learn about a country and the people," she says. This past summer, when she ventured from her home near Tacoma, Wash., it was not to Rome or Rio but to West Africa, where she did as much as six hours' worth of volunteer work each day for three weeks in a village named Ho, 50 miles north of Accra, Ghana. Under the auspices of the organization Cross-Cultural Solutions, Carnright, a part-time real estate agent, assisted in a local nursery school, reading to children, teaching them songs, numbers and colors, and telling them about life in America.
Traveling to far-off places to lend a helping hand is catching on as an alternative to leisure holidays. "It satisfies some inner urges that people may not have been able to satisfy in their normal life," says Bill McMillon, the author of Volunteer Vacations. This guide to worthy adventuring includes some 2,000 projects around the world, up from 70 in the first edition 12 years ago. Back then, McMillon remembers, "everybody was aghast that anyone would work on a vacation."
No longer. Even when living conditions are spare and amenities few, people find volunteer vacationing an enriching experience. In Ghana, Carnright, 74, stayed in a hostel-style building with seven other volunteers, sharing simple meals of rice and chicken or fish and fruit. "It was a healthy experience," she says. And not all that expensive: the $1,850 program fee, not including airfare, is tax deductible.
One of the purposes of Cross-Cultural Solutions, which also sends volunteers to India and Peru, is to awaken understanding of the world's diversity. On many afternoons and evenings, Carnright visited villagers in their homes or met with groups curious about the U.S. and how it differed from Ghana. After her work stint, she spent a week in Accra, where a friend she had made in the village took her to museums, the national park and the beach and told her the history of his country. Reflecting on a summer vacation well spent, Carnright says, "You feel like you have accomplished something. You open things up for people you work with and yourself too."
AFTERNOONS ON THE BEACH
Their accommodations were primitive: an air mattress on a concrete floor in a two-room school and an outdoor shower with only cold water. The work of weeding and raking under a blinding blue sky was demanding, but John Krausser, 63, and his wife Traudi, 59, didn't mind. They were, after all, in the peaceful countryside of Greece, and the view of olive groves, the craggy Peloponnesian terrain and the ocean was spectacular.