Voluntourism: Not Always an Easy Trip
BY DEBRA CUMMINGS
The writer, Debra Cummings, and her husband, Scott Lazenby, are travelling around the world for one year with their 13-year-old daughter, Siobhan, and 10-year-old son, Quinn, volunteering wherever they can. The Calgary mom wrote about the first leg of their trip, focused mainly in Africa, in an article that appears in the April issue of Reader’s Digest. This is the story behind the story.
Armed with books and umpteen websites devoted to volunteer vacations our family thought it would be a snap to combine travel with a Peace Corps-in-miniature experience that was affordable. But “voluntourism”—or doing good while vacationing—isn’t as straightforward as we’d thought.
On average, the cost of short-term volunteer placements is about $1,500 per person per week. Multiply that four ways and those rates proved to be beyond our budget if we wanted to spend a full year travelling, so we started networking with volunteer organizations in Calgary and mined them for resources. That’s how we came to volunteer with Dr. Ciku Mathenge in Nakuru, Kenya. Mathenge acts as a consultant for Calgary-based Operation Eyesight, where my husband, Scott, has volunteered as a spokesperson for several years. While our family found the work interesting, her program is not formally structured to accommodate volunteers. However, Africa is one of the top continents looking for volunteers, and we met scores of individuals who managed to combine service work with travel at organizations whose very roots are dependent on volunteers. These include Voluntary Services Overseas, Canada World Youth, Global Volunteers, Cross-Cultural Solutions, Habitat for Humanity International and EarthWatch. All of those came highly rated from fellow do-gooders—but none had specific family programs or offered a break in fees. In general, it seems the longer the placement the more affordable the program. Some, such as VSO (which typically demands a two-year commitment), include two-month training programs, return air tickets, medical coverage, food and board plus a nominal monthly stipend
You can also hunt down community-friendly organizations such as the Calgary-based safari company Civilized Adventures, which incorporates philanthropic opportunities into their programs. On our 12-day safari in Kenya last October, near the beginning of our trip, we stopped at an orphanage for HIV infected children and visited numerous Maasai and Samburu schools and clinics with lots of Canada-Kenya projects—supplying medical tools, textbooks, water wells. We organized impromptu soccer games (we brought along 10 balls to hand out), gave English lessons and held informal classroom chats, which all became daily highlights for us. Even the lodges (Heritage Hotels) that Civilized Adventures selects for their safaris have community-based outreach programs that funnel a portion of the safari funds to local tribes, assisting them with medical care and education.
In Tanzania we chose a basic camping safari with Sok Adventure that incorporated going on a hunt with the nomadic Hadza people. That was not only one of our best moments but it also gave us a chance to meet a group of people on the cusp of discovering tourism and how it might benefit them. Given enough time, Sok Adventure will also organize volunteer stints, pre- or post-safari, that can range from working at an orphanage to building a school.
Remember, two of your best friends in helping you set up a service-based holiday are a travel agent with contacts in lots of developing nations and the Internet—but allow yourself plenty of time for both channels.
Debra Cummings’s next report, in the June issue of Reader’s Digest, will be about a volunteer program at an elephant camp in Thailand that is affordable for families and has a highly developed/commercialized service component.
BY DEBRA CUMMINGS
The writer, Debra Cummings, and her husband, Scott Lazenby, are travelling around the world for one year with their 13-year-old daughter, Siobhan, and 10-year-old son, Quinn, volunteering wherever they can. The Calgary mom wrote about the first leg of their trip, focused mainly in Africa, in an article that appears in the April issue of Reader’s Digest. This is the story behind the story.
Armed with books and umpteen websites devoted to volunteer vacations our family thought it would be a snap to combine travel with a Peace Corps-in-miniature experience that was affordable. But “voluntourism”—or doing good while vacationing—isn’t as straightforward as we’d thought.
On average, the cost of short-term volunteer placements is about $1,500 per person per week. Multiply that four ways and those rates proved to be beyond our budget if we wanted to spend a full year travelling, so we started networking with volunteer organizations in Calgary and mined them for resources. That’s how we came to volunteer with Dr. Ciku Mathenge in Nakuru, Kenya. Mathenge acts as a consultant for Calgary-based Operation Eyesight, where my husband, Scott, has volunteered as a spokesperson for several years. While our family found the work interesting, her program is not formally structured to accommodate volunteers. However, Africa is one of the top continents looking for volunteers, and we met scores of individuals who managed to combine service work with travel at organizations whose very roots are dependent on volunteers. These include Voluntary Services Overseas, Canada World Youth, Global Volunteers, Cross-Cultural Solutions, Habitat for Humanity International and EarthWatch. All of those came highly rated from fellow do-gooders—but none had specific family programs or offered a break in fees. In general, it seems the longer the placement the more affordable the program. Some, such as VSO (which typically demands a two-year commitment), include two-month training programs, return air tickets, medical coverage, food and board plus a nominal monthly stipend
You can also hunt down community-friendly organizations such as the Calgary-based safari company Civilized Adventures, which incorporates philanthropic opportunities into their programs. On our 12-day safari in Kenya last October, near the beginning of our trip, we stopped at an orphanage for HIV infected children and visited numerous Maasai and Samburu schools and clinics with lots of Canada-Kenya projects—supplying medical tools, textbooks, water wells. We organized impromptu soccer games (we brought along 10 balls to hand out), gave English lessons and held informal classroom chats, which all became daily highlights for us. Even the lodges (Heritage Hotels) that Civilized Adventures selects for their safaris have community-based outreach programs that funnel a portion of the safari funds to local tribes, assisting them with medical care and education.
In Tanzania we chose a basic camping safari with Sok Adventure that incorporated going on a hunt with the nomadic Hadza people. That was not only one of our best moments but it also gave us a chance to meet a group of people on the cusp of discovering tourism and how it might benefit them. Given enough time, Sok Adventure will also organize volunteer stints, pre- or post-safari, that can range from working at an orphanage to building a school.
Remember, two of your best friends in helping you set up a service-based holiday are a travel agent with contacts in lots of developing nations and the Internet—but allow yourself plenty of time for both channels.
Debra Cummings’s next report, in the June issue of Reader’s Digest, will be about a volunteer program at an elephant camp in Thailand that is affordable for families and has a highly developed/commercialized service component.
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