On Nicaragua’s Isla de Ometepe, fish reigns supreme as the number one protein source. And rightfully so! The volcanic island is surrounded by Lago de Nicaragua, the largest lake in Central America. The plateful shown here was at a lovely lunch break in the the town of Altagracia during my recent community-based travel program there.

Mojarra, Guapote, and Tilapia are among the most common varieties of the lake’s fish to make it to local plates. They are usually served up like this, fried whole, but are easy to eat and superbly mild and delish.

Here’s another great fish lunch I had, prepared by host mother Doña Sylvia in the little neighborhood of Taguizapa. It was fried up fresh from the morning catch Sylvia’s son had brought in. And don’t be fooled by the humble rice and beans accompanying it! The rice was grown and cured by hand by Sylvia’s husband Alfonso. It had a subtle sweetness that brought the locally-grown beans to new flavor heights. Local meals like these are among my favorite travel memories.

The virtual feast continues over at WanderFood Wednesday!

DON’T CONSIDER IT A VACATION
Sure, some marketer somewhere along the way thought that the term “volunteer vacation” had a nice ring to it, and I suppose it is rather catchy. But vacation = hedonism, which a good volunteer travel program is not.

Vacation and travel are two different beasts. Vacations are meant to allow you to relax and let go, to disengage from stress, to unplug from everything. And this is an important thing for everyone to do once in awhile! But travel, to me, infers challenge – to heighten your senses, and be even more engaged than perhaps you are in your routine at home. Tuning your cultural antenna to a higher frequency to take in and be affected by all elements of the place you move through: cultural nuance, physical challenge, poignancy not definable with language.

PERFORM A GUT CHECK
Sit down and ask yourself about your true motivations for the experience. Sure, you want to “give back” and “make a difference”. But you could go down to the local homeless shelter and do that, with no need to travel thousands of miles or spend hundreds of dollars. Most people, if they are honest, choose international volunteering because of the opportunity for true cultural immersion and exchange. In my opinion, there’s nothing wrong with that! But you should ask yourself what you really want out of the experience, and be clear about any expectations you have at the onset.

If you don’t get sweaty and dirty every day will it not feel like “work” to you?
Do you need to create some tangible to point to at the end of your foray?
Do you have your heart set on working with kids?
Are you prepared to be uncomfortable at times?
Are you ready for physical labor and very basic accommodation?

NARROW YOUR FOCUS
As volunteer travel continues to grow, the range of options continues to broaden. Determine if your primary focus is environmental, cultural, educational or something else. Perhaps you have a specific skill set you’d like to use. Or maybe you are just guided by a strong interest in a certain country or culture. Thinking about these elements will help to form a picture of the type of experience you might find most rewarding, and will help you to cull the wide range of options at the onset.

DO YOUR RESEARCH
With the focus for your volunteer travel experience in mind, you can start scouring the internet for companies and organizations that offer what you are looking for. This is where you need to do some digging. I recommend starting with the information available on their website, but recommend a call to the company/organization on your “short list”. Some things to consider asking:

How are the programs are designed?
How long they’ve been running and how are they funded?
How are the participation fees used within the program? Is there a tax-deductible portion of the program to consider? (For those run by non-profit organizations)
Look to the future – ask about the long-term sustainability of the project? Is there an end date or goal?
Are you staying locally? Are the funds from the whole trip staying local as well?

Finally, ask if you can be referred to speak to past participants of their programs. Finding someone who can speak candidly on a firsthand experience is extremely insightful.

PREPARE
Once you’ve selected and signed up for the service trip that ticks off the most boxes for you, spend some time and energy to set yourself up for success!

Learn as much as you can about the local culture before you go, especially the unique challenges and issues the community you are connecting with might face. This includes reading about the history of the region to set context as well as guide books and travel literature that talk about the customs and beliefs unique to the area.

Get in shape! No matter what your project may be, being in good cardio-vascular shape is key to your enjoyment of the experience, not to mention your effectiveness at doing the actual work.

If possible, connect with the other travelers in your group before you go. These people will become your team members, and you’ll be sharing an exciting and challenging time together.

If you aren’t doing so already, volunteer at home! This will help you keep the skill set needed for volunteering fresh; things like interpersonal skills, listening and awareness, humility.

LEAVE ROOM FOR WHAT YOU’LL TAKE HOME
A good international volunteer experience will send you home with new inspiration. Show up with an open mind and heart, and be ready for a new perspective on your own world and a renewed commitment to your own community.

A FEW STARTING POINTS
Crooked Trails
Naturally, I have to give a shout out to the org I work for, Crooked Trails. Their two to four week programs focus on home stays and community-based tourism projects in indigenous villages around the world. Crooked Trails allows the communities they work in to dictate the type of engagement their guests have in the village, so while you might be digging latrines in some locales, you could simply be practicing English with school kids in another, depending upon what the host communities believe is most valuable to them.

Andaman Discoveries
Created in response to the devastation caused by the Asian tsunami that occurred in December 2004, this grassroots organization grew from providing intital relief effort to creating long-term, sustainable community-based tourism projects on Thailand’s Andaman Coast.

Earthwatch
Earthwatch focuses on environmental preservation by bringing teams of volunteers to ecologically crucial locations around the world to help with scientific research projects, habitat restoration, stewardship education and more.

Cross Cultural Solutions
Perhaps one of the farthest-reaching non-profit orgs, CCS offers a large range of programs in over 20 countries with placements ranging from 1 – 12 weeks.

Hands on Disaster Relief
HODR organizes volunteers who seek to respond to international disasters and lend a hand in a meaningful way, providing inrastructure and logisitical support to on-site volunteer teams.

In his own voluntourism experience in Kenya, Costas observed that the local residents accomplished far more on their school building project in one hour than the whole volunteer team did in a half day. Having experienced volunteer trips in Peru, India and Thailand myself, I concur – we’re not the fastest work force. I remember trying shovel mud to help make bricks for my host family’s home in Ladakh, India. Shoveling at 14,000+ feet in the Himalayas had me breathless and fatigued in 5 minutes, while my host father Tsering scurried along the newly-forming wall, his small frame heaving heavy mud bricks with ease, as though he’d been doing it all of his life.

Because he had.

Tsering’s body was fully conditioned for this type of work. He’d lived at altitude all his life, and these rudimentary building materials have passed through his hands many times. He knew what he was doing, and would have completed the new room on his house before winter whether I and my fellow travelers had come to help him out or not. But that’s not the point.

The point is that my group of travelers had come all the way to rural Northern India, trekking for 5 days to reach Tsering’s remote mountain home. It’s our presence as tourists from the “developed world”, coming to a place like Ladakh and saying, “We want to do this – we want to have meaningful interactions with locals, we want to recognize and support their own efforts to succeed, and we want to help empower them to flourish”, that actually has the most impact and validation. The Ladakhi culture is an ancient, yet endangered thing. We didn’t come in bringing modern equipment to show them “how to do it” – we used their tried-and-true methods and traditional materials. We pitched in as a way of supporting and honoring their way of life.

On a good voluntourism program, your funds stay local, going towards local businesses and helping to support local families. Keeping money local is a way of “voting with your tourist dollars” – it validates local culture, encourages local pride, and helps support independence from large, foreign corporations making money off the backs and lands of local people. To me, this is the greatest benefit that the voluntourist brings with them.

Several partner communities I work with don’t select hard labor projects for visiting volunteers. Do you know what they really want? English lessons for their children, so that they’ll have more opportunities open to them as adults, not only by having a grasp on the language of world commerce, but also an understanding of other culture and people outside of the insular home they’ve grown up in.

But the traveler benefits hugely from the experience as well. The impact of the home stays and work projects I have experienced on these trips has been life-changing. I see it happen every time a group returns. Trip highlights are rarely the day spent exploring the ruins of Machu Picchu, or seeing big game on safari in Kenya. It’s the connection to the local people, the care and kindness, the true sense of exchange and connection that comes without words when you’ve shared a meal, slept on the floor and sweat together.

In his article, Costas Christ makes a pithy summation, “My advice: Start by probing your own motivations, and be honest with yourself about what you find out.” In our technologically-advanced yet disconnected world, so many of us just yearn to connect with others, especially in travel. It’s a hugely powerful experience, and I don’t think we should pretend that this is not what motivates the vast majority of us to seek out experiences like these. In fact, I think it’s crucial that we use these experiences to tap into the great wealth of love and compassion we all carry in our hearts, and to allow it to awaken a sense of inspiration and empowerment for the true purpose in our lives.

With so many voluntourism opportunities springing up, however, it’s more important than ever to make informed decisions about what you sign on for. Costas points out that many for-profit businesses are cashing in on the “trend”, and travelers are paying blindly to take part in unsustainable projects with little to no lasting local benefit while the organizers profit. Crooked Trails, the community-based tourism organization I work for, is a bit of a special case because it is a federally-recognized non-profit; it’s very structure is created to help channel the funds of tourism in local communities into projects that support them. Being informed about how your money plays into a volunteer program, as well as understanding the non-tangible impacts, is a crucial part of being an informed traveler. (Click here to read my tips for finding a great volunteer trip.) But also ask yourself what you truly seek out of the experience; what you can bring, and what you might take away. And honor that.

All photos by the author except:
Travel and kids in Bhutan: Deters/Luksus via Crooked Trails