Where Travel and Life Intersect

The Trip Where You Show Up to Work.

Volunteer travel gets you past the version of a country that is arranged for visitors.

There is a category of trip where you land, put on work clothes, and spend your days doing something useful for the people who live there. It goes by a few names. Voluntourism is the one that stuck, and most of the people who run these programs have stopped using it.

If you have a skill and more free weeks than you used to, I would put this near the top of the list.

Mike is my neighbor, seventy-three years old and still practicing dentistry. Once a year he spends a week in rural Mexico, setting up a mobile dental clinic with a group of other dentists. February will be his fourteenth trip.

The group is El Niño Rey, started by a Chicago priest in 1995 and now working across twenty villages in Guerrero. It also funds school scholarships, paid against proof that the children attended school the year before.

He told me about the coming trip the other day. He called the conditions rustic, and he was clearly looking forward to them. Patients walk in, or arrive on donkeys. Thirteen trips in, he has a version of that country no itinerary sells.

The drywall

I had my own smaller version. For two years I went down to New Orleans to work on houses, four days at a time, with basic carpentry skills that were better by the end.

What I remember is the working itself. Four days on a job site next to people who live there gets you a conversation a restaurant table never will.

I went with colleagues, and building something together in the heat turned out to be a better way to know them than any offsite I have attended.

You do not need a trade. Habitat for Humanity takes volunteers who arrive knowing nothing. Other organizations want bookkeepers, gardeners, teachers, someone willing to sit with an English learner for an hour.

The dormitory

The questions below are how you find one worth your week.

These trips suit some people and frustrate others. Ask what the days look like, how many hours, and in what heat.

Ask where you sleep, since some programs mean a dormitory with shared bathrooms and others a hotel and a van. Ask how much of the week is yours. Know which one you signed up for before you land.

Then the questions about the work. Ask who directs it on the ground, because in the arrangements that hold up, local staff set the priorities and volunteers work behind them.

Ask what happens after you fly home, since the trips that draw criticism are the ones that leave houses and patients half finished with nobody there to see them through. Ask whether the job you will be doing is one a local worker could be paid to do, and if it is, ask why they are not paying one.

Good organizations answer all of this without hesitation. Habitat for Humanity runs Global Village builds in seventeen countries and takes individual volunteers again. Projects Abroad places people over fifty in work that draws on their professional background.

Road Scholar runs service programs inside the United States, and the National Park Service will put you on a trail crew, with a free park pass at 250 hours.

Mike goes back in February. He is already signed up.

by Paul M. Rand, Founder and editor of Nomadic Spirit

Destinations worth traveling for, and understanding once you arrive

Chautauqua, New York

The place that assumes you are coming back.

At 10:45 on a weekday morning in July, several thousand people walk to the same building.

They come from porches all over the grounds, on foot and on bicycles and on mobility scooters, down brick streets with almost no cars. They fill a 4,400-seat open-air amphitheater, listen to one person talk for an hour, and then go to lunch and argue about it.

This has been happening in some form since 1874.

Chautauqua Institution occupies 227 gated acres on a lake in the southwest corner of New York, ninety minutes from Buffalo. Inside the gates are Victorian houses set close to the street with porches that nearly everyone uses, gardens, a plaza with a post office and a library and a bookstore, a golf course and a beach.

You do not need to own one of those houses. The Athenaeum Hotel has stood beside the Amphitheater since 1881, a 152-room Second Empire building with a two-story porch and rocking chairs facing the water.

Lewis Miller had it put up by ninety men in ninety days, then asked his son-in-law Thomas Edison to wire it, which made it one of the first hotels anywhere lit by electricity. Bill Clinton stayed a week there in 1996 to prepare for his debate with Bob Dole.

The dining room has no air conditioning, and coat and tie is still welcome at dinner. Houses and apartments on the grounds rent by the week, and plenty of those have no air conditioning either.

The day

Worship at 8:15, and a market on the plaza. The 10:45 lecture is the spine of everything, and each of the nine weeks carries its own subject, with this season's speakers including Ken Burns and Rainn Wilson.

Afternoons bring more lectures, brown bag talks on the Literary Arts Center porch, and orchestra rehearsals anyone can sit in on. Roughly 10,000 people a year sign up for classes in ceramics, photography, wine and much else.

The reading circle the Institution started in 1878 is one of the oldest continuous book clubs in the country. It runs on a four-year course, and graduating means reading twelve of its selections, which tells you what the founders expected of a member.

Evenings belong to the Amphitheater. The Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra has played there since 1929, most Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays through the season, alongside an opera company, a theater company, and conservatory students who practice in public all over the grounds.

The popular bill this summer includes Josh Groban, Harry Connick Jr. and Trombone Shorty.

Dinner is the Heirloom porch at the Athenaeum, or the wine bar on Bestor Plaza, or the craft bar by the water, or your own kitchen and whatever you carried home from the market.

Coming back

Cottages pass down inside families. One visitor describes his family as six-generation Chautauquans and calls it the one place on earth he lets his children roam.

Another couple came for a week, returned the next two summers, then noticed a sign on a porch in 2016 asking for hosts to run a bed and breakfast. They applied, got it, and have spent every summer there since.

In August 2022, the place was tested. Salman Rushdie was stabbed on the Amphitheater stage as he stood to speak.

The Institution resumed programming immediately, and its president said the answer was more of what Rushdie had come to represent. There are metal detectors now, and more security on the grounds, and regulars report that it has not changed what the place is for them.

What it costs

Enough to matter. A week runs $689 to $759 per adult in 2026, plus $85 to park, and the full nine-week season is $3,315.

The season ends August 30, and the last week, beginning August 22, is given over to a program about gathering built with the Smithsonian Folklife Festival.

Some visitors find the whole arrangement pleased with itself, and the reviews carry that complaint often enough to take seriously. The Institution also lets anyone in free on Sundays, charges from $40 for a morning that includes the lecture, and asks nothing at all of children twelve and under.

Anyone who has turned ninety gets in free.