For Those Who Aid Others, 'Tourist' Doesn't Tell the Whole Story

ANNE MCMULLIN of San Francisco said she did not know what to expect when she and her 11-year-old son, Nicholas, signed up for a two-week stint in Salvador, Brazil, with Cross-Cultural Solutions, a volunteer travel organization. All she knew was that she wanted to forgo what she called the "life-of-privilege way of traveling" and "go a little deeper."

Go deeper they did. Ms. McMullin and Nicholas slept in a room with two strangers and shared meals and four bathrooms with more than 20 other volunteers. By 8 a.m., they were bound for an orphanage where Ms. McMullin hung laundry and organized activities while Nicholas played games, served meals and made paper planes with 44 children.

Now, Ms. McMullin said, if their future travels do not have a service component, "I think we would be missing something."

Her sentiments are shared by others — many others. Stefanie Rubin, director of the International Volunteer Programs Association, estimated that 50,000 to 75,000 Americans will travel overseas to take part in short-term volunteer programs this year. And in a May survey of 1,500 tourists, the Travel Industry Association of America found that 24 percent of the respondents were interested in service-based vacations.

Even Travelocity is on board. The online agency recently announced its Travel for Good program, whose partners include Cross-Cultural Solutions, Earthwatch and Globe Aware. So numerous are the volunteer options, said Michelle Peluso, chief executive of Travelocity, that many people are confused by the choices.

"What we're good at is making complex information easier for consumers to figure out," Ms. Peluso said. "This will allow for voluntourism to become mainstream."

Ms. Rubin attributes this passion for volunteerism to "a shift in our culture. We're showing social responsibility in everything from the products we buy to the way we travel," she said.

While volunteer travel has been around for years — Earthwatch and Habitat for Humanity helped popularize it four decades ago — many experts said that the impetus for the renewed interest could be traced to 9/11, with the Asian tsunami in 2004 and Hurricane Katrina generating bursts of altruistic behavior among travelers.

"After Sept. 11, people initially stayed at home," Ms. Rubin said. "But then they became more and more aware of global issues and got out of their safety zone."

Kam Santos, the spokeswoman for Cross-Cultural Solutions, in New Rochelle, N.Y., has noticed a wave of interest. In 2002, the nonprofit group signed up 854 volunteers. By the end of this year, she said, she expected the number to reach 3,300. Participants pay $2,489, excluding air fare, for two-week programs in Guatemala, Tanzania, Peru, Brazil and many other countries.

These days, many travelers have competing goals, Ms. Santos notes. "People say, 'I want to go and hike Mount Kilimanjaro, but I also want to see what life is really like in Africa.' You're not going to get both experiences as a tourist," she said. That is one reason travelers are either signing up for service-oriented programs that include leisure travel time, as Cross-Cultural Solutions does, or tacking on a more concentrated program to a pleasure trip.

Last summer, Tanya Villanueva Tepper, who owns a gift shop in Queens, included a week of volunteer work at the end of a trip to Peru. After exploring the Inca trail, she flew to Lima, where a representative from the Dallas-based group Globe Aware met her and escorted her to the Andean village of San Pedro de Casta. There, she taught some English, painted houses and helped build fuel-efficient stoves out of donkey dung, earth and agave syrup. For Ms. Villanueva Tepper, 38, the trip fulfilled a passion to explore both the region's ancient past and present. But on a personal level, she said, her experiences in the village, where there was no running water and the biggest wish among the children there was having a bathroom, did much to soothe Ms. Villanueva Tepper's own loss. During 9/11, her fiancé, a firefighter in New York, died.

"When you're confronted with such a loss, you seek anything that can bring you comfort," she said. "One of the best ways is seeing someone who has it worse than you."

Another volunteer, Pedro Castellon, 24, of Miami, represents a group that is finding its way into short-term volunteer trips: students seeking academic credit. Mr. Castellon's help with Tanzanian patients who have AIDS, malaria and other diseases counted toward his master's degree in public health from Florida International University. But Mr. Castellon said that his experience at the small Catholic hospital, where pigs were raised in the back and sold to help finance patients' medical costs, transcended the practical reasons for his being there.

"If you don't go there, you just don't know," said Mr. Castellon, whose four-week stay was arranged by Cross-Cultural Solutions. "You have to read it in a book or on the Internet or hear it from Bono."

Parents like Ms. McMullin, baby boomers taking early retirement, working professionals — all are showing up for these trips in higher numbers, tour organizers said.

Kimberly Haley-Coleman, executive director of Globe Aware, said that her nonprofit organization, which started with 5 programs in 2000 and hopes to have 15 next year, attracts working professionals. One-week programs, starting at $1,000, are offered in nine countries, including Laos and Cambodia, where volunteers assemble wheelchairs from recycled materials for land-mine victims.

"These people seem to be interested in a concentrated program," Ms. Haley-Coleman said. To that end, she said, "we develop projects that are concrete and completable in one week, with no skills required." She added that "our focus is not to change or make cultures we go to like us. We're there to give options and ideas."

Her philosophy jibes with that of the International Volunteer Programs Association, which strongly encourages its 34 non-governmental, nonproselytizing member organizations, to "focus primarily on where volunteers are needed and what is needed from them," as Ms. Rubin put it.

But that is only when it comes to program development. Volunteer safety, on the other hand, tops the list of ways in which the industry should be standardized, Ms. Rubin said. She urged consumers to look at the I.V.P.A . Web site, volunteerinternational.org, for tips on what constitutes a reputable program, which include those that either provide emergency medical insurance or require participants to have insurance.

Consumers should also know if the organization is a commercial or nonprofit entity. The cost of the latter's trips are tax-deductible; nonprofit organizations must also account for how money is being used. "As long as the program is providing quality in terms of our best practices and principles, and there is no exploitation of marginalized populations, there is no reason why for-profits shouldn't be included," Ms. Rubin said.

One member, Volunteer Adventures, based in Denver, is a company that is wholeheartedly behind that philosophy, said Ross Wehner, its managing director.

"Being for-profit gives us a lot of freedom, in terms of marketing and recruiting people," Mr. Wehner said, adding that Volunteer Adventures has a formula for contributing to the local organizations it works with. "For-profits are the ones that have the capacity to make this a mass movement."

Meanwhile, volunteers like Alana Kennedy, 63, of Long Island, are not sure who benefits more from these efforts: the travelers or the people they help out.

"This fulfills the need I have to give back and also to work part of the year," said Ms. Kennedy, a former vice president at Nynex who retired in her late 50s and since 2001 has spent three months a year doing community service in Guatemala, Peru, India and elsewhere. "I spend a good part of the year in a cocoon of good friends and family, and then I jump into the unknown."