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