Leaving More than you Take

Have you ever heard about volunteer travel experiences such as mine or others, and wondered what it’s all about? What it’s really like? What a day or a week is like and how you can get involved?

Women Travel The World, a great website dedicated to adventurous women travelers, features a story today by me, recounting my experiences with voluntourism at orphanages in India. If you really want a “day in the life” diary account, I invite you to check it out. Here’s an excerpt:

The village is remote, and it took forty-eight hours of exhausting travel to arrive at the ashram where the children live. By the time we arrived, all ten volunteers in the group were suffering from sleep deprivation and culture shock; the overwhelming throngs of people, the smells and sounds that awakened all the senses at once. The streets filled with bicycles, rickshaws, cars and cows with the constant, blaring beep-beep of the horns that rose above it all. Mostly, the frantic poverty that does not let you rest.

Nothing could have prepared me for what I felt when we turned through those gates. Dozens of children were lined around the drive in a semi-circle, waving and chanting “welcome” over and over. I climbed out and they swarmed all over me, reaching for my hands and touching my feet in blessing. In many ways they were just like other children I’ve known with homes and families of their own – except for their neediness, their raw hunger for affection, love, belonging. I was overwhelmed, lost in the sea of small bodies; smiling, barefoot children who asked nothing from me more than simply being there.”

Read the Full Article Here!

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