What is Voluntourism and How Can I Do It?

Hey everyone! Our social media guru at Soles4Souls did a blog post about the Travel4Souls department that we wanted to also share with you! Pretty awesome!!

Zip lining through a tropical rain forest. Skipping rope with kids at a local orphanage.  Exploring a country for the first time. Experiencing a new culture and language. Buying fresh fruit from a Tanzanian market. Changing someone’s life.
These are all just tiny parts of voluntourism. Voluntourism is a pretty big deal right now. It’s nothing new, but the catchy term has recently caught on with people across the world. Soles4Souls Founder Wayne Elsey blogged about it and our Travel4Souls team lives it.

 

Meet Katie Lentile and Emily Prokopik. Katie is our Travel Manager and developed the program over the past year and a half. She is responsible for development, marketing, planning, logistics and even more various tasks that make each trip possible. Emily, the Travel Coordinator, joined our team in July and spends her time communicating with the participants and assisting Katie with leading the international trips. The program is a mere 18 months old, yet saw 16 trips in the first year, and 20-25 trips are scheduled for 2012. I guess you could say Katie and Emily spend most of their time abroad!

Meeting the locals, washing their feet and fitting them for new shoes is always on the agenda. But there is so much more to a trip than the itinerary. Katie says, “Our ultimate reason for creating and investing in Travel4Souls, is to give people the opportunity to step out of their comfort zones and help others around the world. We also exist to educate our participants of the needs around the world as well as in our backyards and help them make others more aware. We want to empower them to make a difference. We don’t want it to be a one week thing—Travel4Souls is a family and our mission is to empower people to help others. The ripple effect of changed lives is incredible.”

The team posts blog updates while they’re away and when they return from a trip. However, we always love reading what our participants write and how they document their experiences. One girl in particular captured her emotions upon returning home. You can read her full post here. Below is just an excerpt:

“My mind is flooded with thoughts. Completely inspired by this trip, we all thirst to do more. We handle it in different ways.
It’s been a few days and I still find myself bursting out in to tears at inopportune moments. At a busy toy store in Miami, I began to have a full-blown panic attack seeing all of the children pulling and pushing at their parents. Crying and wailing, they begged for plastic barrettes, Hello Kitty wallets, and the like. I kneeled down to inspect a set of hairpins that caught my eye. My curiosity quickly turned to introspection. My thoughts flew at warp speed. Visions of the little girls in La Carpio mobbing me as I ran out the locked gate to the school quickly flashed before my eyes. They weren’t mobbing me for the box of stickers and toys I was handing out. They weren’t squealing at me in Spanish with tears in their eyes. They were smiling and lining up to simply give me a hug and a kiss.

“Te Amo!!!!”, each of them belted at me before they stepped aside to let the next little one have their chance. Once I realized that all they wanted was a chance to show love and gratitude, I hugged one little girl longer. I will never forget what she looked like despite the throngs of children we met and she will never know how much she changed me.
It was on that last day in La Carpio when I realized something. I did not see these children nor any of the citizens of La Carpio as poor. When I use that word, I mean it in the sense of impoverished or with lack of money. I saw them as rich, even lucky, to be so full of love despite living lives which most Americans would find unacceptable.”In addition, we’ve documented trips via video. Here is just one recap:



We hope this has given you a glimpse into what it’s like to travel to a foreign country, immerse yourself in the culture and spend time investing in the lives of those who need it most. If you have any questions, check out the Travel4Souls Web site or feel free to ask on our Facebook and Twitter pages. (And please like and follow accordingly! We could use your help with that). Thank you and Katie and Emily can’t wait to meet you!

Thanks Rebecca for sharing about the Travel4Souls deparment and doing this post (with pictures and video) :) We LOVE our PR team!!