Why You Should Take a Volunteer Vacation

Squatting on creaky knees, machete in hand, sweating from every pore (and believe me, with temps at 90 degrees and over 90-percent humidity, you will sweat), I found myself in rural Guatemala, a long, long way from Toto, from my Boise branding agency and the arid climate back home in Idaho. It was just what I was looking for: a vacation that mixed new experiences with helping others.

Months before, I had responded to an invitation for a volunteer service trip with Semilla Nueva, an NGO I’d helped with fundraising and whose co-founder, Curt Bowen, appeared in our Change Maker series.

Semilla Nueva is a socially entrepreneurial organization working to end malnourishment and hunger in Guatemala. Their work is important; Guatemala has the highest chronic malnutrition rate for children under five in the Western Hemisphere and the fourth highest rate on the planet.

Meaning “new seed,” Semilla Nueva was started in 2010 as a grassroots collaboration between several Guatemalans and Americans. Since then it’s made several pivots as it attempts to find the best way to help rural communities gain economic independence and rejuvenate their land through hands-on education and collaborative sustainable agriculture projects.

I went on this, my first extended volunteer service trip, for several reasons: a desire to help people; to see if we could blueprint a volunteer vacation program for our Idaho branding agency; to explore Guatemala; and, frankly, to get outside my middle-aged, white male comfort zone.

As always, when you volunteer you get more than you give. Here’s some of what I got from the experience, as well as what might await you if you choose to make your vacation a service-based adventure.

Tour Guides

When you go on a trip like this, it comes pre-loaded with assistance, which I found especially helpful for traveling to a Third-world country. Semilla Nueva staff Haley, Kendall, and Emma were fantastic representatives of their organization, as well as great guides. They provided translation services, insights into the culture and history, and an insider’s perspective on the Guatemala experience—something you don’t necessarily get in your standard, garden-variety vacation.

New Friends

I gained new friends, such as “Super” Mario, our Guatemalan driver, who not only translated, but provided local color commentary, as well as safely navigating some crazy, crazy Guatemalan traffic (more on that later). We’re now Facebook friends. Thanks, Mark Zuckerberg.

And Juanito, a farmer and community promoter for Semilla Nueva, whose stories over lunch about the dark times of the Guatemalan Civil War and the people’s movement to regain farmland left nary a dry eye at the table. 

And of course the other volunteers, interesting people from different backgrounds: John and Pam, recent cancer survivors; Mike, a high-tech engineer making his fourth trip to Guatemala; Bill, a retired, semi-expat who now spends his days studying Spanish and funding Guatemalan NGOs; and my daughter Kate, an experienced Third-world traveler preparing to obtain a master’s degree in nutrition (especially relevant on this trip).

New Experiences

We took part in a Harvard-backed study to weigh and measure infants to gauge the effects of a high-protein corn diet on their growth. We tracked down participants via our crowded and cramped van while hurtling through the rutted, dirt backroads of the Guatemalan countryside.

What I learned from this experience is that mothers are pretty much the same everywhere—hardworking and caring, they just want to ensure that their kids grow up safe and healthy.

We harvested sesame, a cash crop that’s being raised in trial plots to assess different seeds for improved quality attributes. This could allow for increased exports to premium-price markets in Asia. 

We assisted at Semilla Nueva’s annual farmers conference where we cut and bundled Chaya starts, unwrapped hundreds of tamales (with bare hands I quickly understood why the adjective “hot” is so intimately attached to the noun), served meals, entertained children, and washed dishes. 

As for the experience of the country itself, Guatemala is truly an amazing and trippy place.

We started the trip in Antigua, where we bargained for beautiful textiles with Mayan women amidst backdrop of Spanish colonial ruins and still-standing architecture going back to the 1500s.

We left Antigua for the Semilla Nueva research station out in the country and drove through a beautiful landscape of jungles, coffee plantations, and volcanoes, even seeing a volcano in the initial stages of distress, belching smoke and steam which later became a major eruption a couple of days later.

We drove through a deluge created by several rainstorms—flash floods, really—which turned some roads into torrents we had to ford (nearly float) in our van.

And the Guatemalan drivers—can four lanes of mammoth sugarcane trucks, autos, motorcycles, and bicycles fit on a road built for two lanes? Absolutely! 

At trip’s end, we wound up at a Swiss Family Robinson-style hostel on the Pacific Coast, the entire group bunking together for the night in a large, open-air room, each of us swaddled in mosquito netting. At first light the next morning, my daughter and I walked the beach and were fortunate enough to watch a baby sea-turtle release at a nearby sanctuary.

New Growth and Perspective

I’ve been steeped in the local movement for a long time, working primarily with the mindset that I needed to focus my time and efforts in my community around Boise. Of course there are good reasons for this, but I’ve recently been influenced by the writing of E.O. Wilson in The Meaning of Human Existence and his arguments against tribalism as a primary barrier to human unity.

This is another good reason to expand your volunteering beyond the known and comfortable world of your home community. On a trip like this, what you get are intimate experiences—not with service staff refilling your margarita at a resort—but with people who provide perspective not only on their own circumstances and culture, but on yours as well.

Every day I was presented with some hard thinking—about the water I was drinking (and don’t put your toothbrush under the faucet), the food I was eating (what’s that in my soup?), the machete in my hands (sharp!), even the language I was using to communicate. It took me out of robot mode and felt like it opened new pathways in my brain.

It provided a unique opportunity for self-reflection and also delivered a mighty big dose of gratitude. Outside of the benefit of humility that gratitude brings us, scientific studies now point toward a strong tie between gratitude and happiness. How’s that for an excuse to take a vacation?

My Semilla Nueva experience also gave me ideas for how we could incorporate service vacations into our volunteer program here at Oliver Russell. If you’d be interested to learn more about this, send me an email at rstoddard@oliverrussell.com.

And if you’re considering a volunteer vacation, either as an individual or for your company, there’s a world of options with organizations that specialize in the field. How about bottle-feeding orphaned lion cubs in Zambia through Amanzi Travel or an ocean cruise with Fathom, a new impact-travel cruise line that offers volunteer experiences in the Dominican Republic and Cuba?

So if you love to learn or you live to give, if you need to break out of a rut or just want to be a little happier with your life, I can’t recommend a volunteer vacation enough.

For me, it beats poolside at the resort any day.

Author’s note: In this season of giving, you might consider contributing to a powerful three-times matching grant campaign for Semilla Nueva. Your contribution will help purchase high-protein, drought-resistant corn seed for 40,000 families. You can learn more about it here.