Volunteer Abroad, and Travel, Too
Four Reasons Boomers Should do Voluntravel During Economic Recovery
Oct 8, 2009
Retirees are hoping to go back to work. Baby boomers have postponed retirement. People are shifting from one career to another. It's tough. One alternative to moping about the slow economic recovery is to just get out of town, and see how the other half lives. Literally.
No longer a new concept in either travel or volunteering, the concept of “voluntravel” — that is, hands-on holidays that help make the world a better place — has certain advantages. Here are four reasons it's worth doing.
Peace Corps, A Formative Concept in International Volunteer Service for Boomers
First of all, there’s the Peace Corps effect—that is, opportunity for Americans to reach across cultural divides to help others. Rick Lathrop, the founder of San Francisco-based Global Service Corps calls the motive behind the popularity of volunteer travel the "'60s ethic of serving.” He believes that many boomers retain their youthful admiration for the idealism and national service aspect of Peace Corps, which was founded in 1960 by President John F. Kennedy. Back then, the Peace Corps was an elite program, and often the work was extremely challenging, even life-changing, for Peace Corps volunteers. Today, interestingly, the Peace Corps is still in operation — and it has a special recruitment program for volunteers over 50.
Volunteering Abroad Offers Boomers, Retirees to Combine Travel with Service to Others
Second, international volunteer travel programs aren’t “prepackaged” trips as so many tours can be. Globalization has its upsides, but international cultural homogenization isn’t one of them. It can be disappointing to arrive somewhere after a 3,000 or 5,000 mile flight, only to discover that a foreign city looks startling familiar. Volunteer travel reinstates an important factor into the travel equation: the unknown. When working abroad, even as a volunteer, things crop up: unexpected, sometimes challenging, real life situations occur that imbue even a short trip with what, historically, travel has provided: a chance to explore new places and cultures, try new things, challenge oneself — and even to be a different person, in a sense.
Participate through Volunteering
Third, travelers who volunteer are participants, not observers. After retirement, social worker Marge Rubin started to volunteer via a NY-based organization, Cross Cultural Solutions.
“I wanted to be more active and not just a passive observer,” she said. She spent several weeks in orphanages, teaching art therapy in countries as far flung as India, Ghana and Peru to Russia, Costa Rica, Thailand and Tanzania. She even worked in Kosovo refugee camp, a profoundly moving and memorable experience.
Voluntravel Offers Rare Chance To Meet People Abroad-Through Work
Fourth, many American volunteers make lasting friendships and build gratifying interpersonal connections at a local level with people they’d never, in their wildest dreams, meet in the course of normal daily life. For instance, a single, 60-something, Brooklyn-based unmarried college professor with no children has returned for Cambodia every summer for over a decade. She teaches students there, and is welcomed warmly. The Cambodians who are her friends there are, she says, “like family.”
Voluntravel is stimulating, adventurous and generous-spirited. It's true, one might be away from the job-hunt for a few weeks. And one has to consider things such as the cost of volunteering (it's an expense, not an income-producing activity), and getting decent healthcare abroad. But upon return, being able to exude energy, tell interesting stores, and show some gumption can't hurt in the employment marketplace. A service trip abroad can reawaken one's sense of gratitude, and put in perspective just how richly, in many ways, Americans live.
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