Lend a Helping Hand

By EMILY MITCHELL

Volunteering to help others in faraway places is an increasingly popular vacation option, in which you can combine your zest for travel with the desire to do good.

TAKE THE ALTRUISM EXPRESS

Nice as it was, Pat Carnright's cruise to Alaska two years ago just wasn't quite enough. "It's so much more fun to go and learn about a country and the people," she says. This past summer, when she ventured from her home near Tacoma, Wash., it was not to Rome or Rio but to West Africa, where she did as much as six hours' worth of volunteer work each day for three weeks in a village named Ho, 50 miles north of Accra, Ghana. Under the auspices of the organization Cross-Cultural Solutions, Carnright, a part-time real estate agent, assisted in a local nursery school, reading to children, teaching them songs, numbers and colors, and telling them about life in America.

Traveling to far-off places to lend a helping hand is catching on as an alternative to leisure holidays. "It satisfies some inner urges that people may not have been able to satisfy in their normal life," says Bill McMillon, the author of Volunteer Vacations. This guide to worthy adventuring includes some 2,000 projects around the world, up from 70 in the first edition 12 years ago. Back then, McMillon remembers, "everybody was aghast that anyone would work on a vacation."

No longer. Even when living conditions are spare and amenities few, people find volunteer vacationing an enriching experience. In Ghana, Carnright, 74, stayed in a hostel-style building with seven other volunteers, sharing simple meals of rice and chicken or fish and fruit. "It was a healthy experience," she says. And not all that expensive: the $1,850 program fee, not including airfare, is tax deductible.

One of the purposes of Cross-Cultural Solutions, which also sends volunteers to India and Peru, is to awaken understanding of the world's diversity. On many afternoons and evenings, Carnright visited villagers in their homes or met with groups curious about the U.S. and how it differed from Ghana. After her work stint, she spent a week in Accra, where a friend she had made in the village took her to museums, the national park and the beach and told her the history of his country. Reflecting on a summer vacation well spent, Carnright says, "You feel like you have accomplished something. You open things up for people you work with and yourself too."

AFTERNOONS ON THE BEACH

Their accommodations were primitive: an air mattress on a concrete floor in a two-room school and an outdoor shower with only cold water. The work of weeding and raking under a blinding blue sky was demanding, but John Krausser, 63, and his wife Traudi, 59, didn't mind. They were, after all, in the peaceful countryside of Greece, and the view of olive groves, the craggy Peloponnesian terrain and the ocean was spectacular.

The Kraussers had signed on with Service Civil International of Seattle, which coordinates work camps in 50 countries. Since they have a strong interest in classical Greek culture, they volunteered for two weeks last spring to clear the overgrown site of an ancient amphitheater in Mycenae. Occasionally turning up pieces of marble in the theater's dusty floor, Traudi held them in her hand and imagined what the place and people had been like thousands of years ago. Weekend trips to Delphi and Olympia, arranged by the Greek cultural organization sponsoring the work camp, were an unexpected bonus.

Using some free air miles to fly from their home in Seattle to Corfu, and with the cost of food and lodging at the work camp only $125 a person, the Kraussers spent less than $1,000 for their two weeks. The Greek group leader often sauteed calamari for a treat at lunch, which was the main meal, and the seven other campers, all in their 20s and from Holland, France, Crete and Britain, shared recipes. Everyone ate together at a large table under a shade tree in front of the little school. When the Kraussers weren't wearing shorts and T shirts, they were in swimsuits. After four hours' work under the blazing morning sun, they had afternoons free and soon discovered a beautiful sweeping sand beach frequented only by a few local families. "This became our favorite spot," John says, "where we would swim, sunbathe and read." Surrounded by all that beauty, who wouldn't put up with an air mattress?

IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE

At dawn on his vacation, Lee Peachey climbed a hill in the Ecuadorian cloud forest and unfolded thin nets strung between bamboo poles. When birds, often Amazilia hummingbirds or gray-breasted wood wrens, flew into the nets, he patiently untangled them and, with sweat pouring down his face and into his glasses, carried them down a steep path to a work station below. There he and his wife Helen or one of their three teammates on an Earthwatch expedition recorded the birds' size, type and condition, took blood samples and made sure they were banded before setting them free. At dusk Lee closed the nets and took his turn cooking dinner or cleaning up. Then he collapsed, exhausted, in a tent. "I wouldn't trade it for anything," he declares. "Hard work, but it was marvelous."

Helen agrees and says, "It is something special to get that far away from the world." A clinical-research nurse, she exercises regularly but had a rough time on the rugged, muddy 9-mile trek up to the base camp in the Machalilla National Park of coastal Ecuador. It was easier for Lee, a biophysicist who at 67 still bikes 30 miles round trip every day between their home in a Philadelphia suburb and his office at the University of Pennsylvania. For their nine days, not including airfare, they paid a little less than $1,600, which is partly tax deductible. "Practicing retirement" is how the couple describes this adventure. But Helen admits to another motive. "I had just turned 60," she says, "and had to prove to myself that I could still do it."

And she did, even though she was on one of the most rigorous of the more than 140 Earthwatch research projects this year. The Earthwatch Institute, based in Watertown, Mass., is a pioneer in enlisting volunteer workers to assist scientists on projects from deserts to ocean floors. This year 720 volunteer teams will go to international and U.S. sites, compared with just four when Earthwatch was launched in 1971. While more than 2,000 scientific papers have resulted from Earthwatch expeditions, volunteers for the most part are required only to have physical endurance and willing hands. Supervised by ecologist Dustin Becker, the Peacheys' team captured and recorded some 300 birds and added to the store of knowledge about Ecuador's dwindling tropical-forest habitat.

HOOKED ON HELPING

Working and raising their three daughters left Duane and Bettie Peterson little time or money for travel--until four years ago, when Duane took early retirement from his product-development job for Gillette and Bettie quit working as a nurse. "We started thinking about how we've been given a lot out of life and wanted to give something back," he says. Signing on with Global Volunteers, the couple from Hudson, Wis., have jetted off to places they had only dreamed of seeing: Costa Rica and the South Pacific. Their favorite jaunt was to China, where they spent three weeks last year teaching conversational English to college-age Chinese students in the city of X'ian. "We would ask them what they wanted to talk about, and they would listen and try to converse," explains Bettie. The first questions, she noted, were about Michael Jordan and the NBA.

Every year Global Volunteers, which is based in St. Paul, Minn., sends some 1,500 workers to 21 international projects ranging from health care, business and community improvement to teaching English. Their airfare and the cost of $2,095 each are tax deductible. "It was a wonderful way to experience a culture, vs. going as a tourist," Bettie says. On free afternoons and weekends, they went sightseeing and enjoyed trying the local cuisine. Duane, whom everyone calls Pete, developed a taste for eel with hot pepper. They were invited to cook dinner with a Chinese family in their home, and were allowed to visit the hut of a Taoist monk--a rare privilege, even for the Chinese. After waiting almost a lifetime to travel at all, the Petersons now plan to do volunteer vacations every year. Says Pete: "We're hooked."

--With reporting by Michele Donley/Chicago and Anne Moffett/Washington

With reporting by Michele Donley/Chicago and Anne Moffett/Washington