|
Page 1
Dorothy Engler felt blessed. She had fulfilling work as a Montessori teacher and the satisfaction of seeing her older child enter medical school and the younger one graduate college. But it wasn’t until last spring that the 54-year-old from Bloomington, Minn. felt ready to finally do something she had wanted to do for over a decade.
Since seeing the pictures of Romanian orphans that hit the news during that government’s collapse 12 years ago, Engler had it in the back of her mind that she would someday find a way to help. In March, she found it, opting to forego an annual pleasure trip in favor of a working vacation with Minnesota-based Global Volunteers. She traveled to a home and clinic for abandoned and disabled children in Romania and spent eight-hour days feeding, changing and cuddling a group of 10 infants and toddlers with three other volunteers.
"Actually seeing the conditions was what moved me the most,” says Engler, who plans to return next spring. “The European influence is just starting there — it’s still primitive. I deal with kids here in the Minnesota area in my work, but this was totally different.”
Voluntourists Seek Life-Changing Trips
Engler and Global Volunteers, a 25-year-old nonprofit dedicated to arranging volunteer work trips, are part of a movement that’s growing as more people seek ways to give back to the world. Nearly 3.5 million Americans, or about 3 percent of all tourists, take annual volunteer vacations, according to Forrester Research. And 11 percent of Travelocity members surveyed in February 2007 expressed interest in voluntourism, up 90 percent from a survey six months earlier.
Volunteering in general starts with an “innate desire in all of us to give back and add meaning to our lives,” says Global Volunteers founder and CEO Bud Philbrook. He attributes the increase in popularity of volunteer vacations largely to increased awareness from media reports, a growing number of websites dedicated to the topic, and especially to word-of-mouth. Today, he says, about half of new volunteers come to the organization through referrals from friends.
The terms “volunteer vacation” or “voluntourism” can mean anything from a pleasure trip that includes a few hours of work to a working trip that might also feature some sightseeing. Typical voluntourism trips last a week or two, the length of most people‘s vacations, but can last for a season or even a year.
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 NEXT PAGE>
Community Voice
|
Join a Discussion Forum in this category