Voluntourism vacations

THIRD WORLD COMES FIRST | For some people, giving is best part of a getaway

The most apprehension I have ever felt on a plane was a flight from Chicago to Miami. The ride itself was smooth. But I knew that once we landed, it was my last chance to bail before I boarded my next flight bound for Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

People had been warning me for months about visiting a country on the U.S. State Department travel advisory list. I worried about sudden uprisings. Lack of infrastructure. A political riot where we couldn't leave the country. Being kidnapped.

For some reason -- maybe because I was traveling with a group of 18 and didn't want to look scared -- I didn't bail. When we arrived in Miami, I got on my next flight to Port-au-Prince and prepared to be part of a growing trend: voluntourism. No sipping fruity drinks by the pool or reading romance novels on the beach for me. I was going to help a team of pediatric nurse practitioners in a remote mountain village.

I spent a lot of time asking myself why I was devoting a week's vacation to help out in a Third World country. I'm not really the selfless, giving type. My real motivation was twofold: the chance to visit Haiti, a country I'd likely never see on my own, and the opportunity to interact with people beyond the level of tourist. If I helped someone in the process, that would be icing on the cake.

Even though I had no healthcare training, the team leader, Sue Walsh of suburban Glenview, was happy to have me along on her second trip.

"We'll find a job for you," she said. I persuaded my husband, Mark, to join me. We'd recently married and returned from Italy, so we jokingly called it the Caribbean leg of our honeymoon.

Our team of 18 was met at the Port-au-Prince airport by Willem Charles, director of Mountain Top Ministries. MTM is a Christian, U.S.-based nonprofit serving the people of Gramothe, a village in the mountains about an hour outside Port-au-Prince.

Charles and his drivers ushered us through customs to two trucks waiting outside. They loaded one truck with suitcases of medicine and I volunteered to ride in the cab. I watched Mark and the rest of the team being herded like cattle into the back of the other truck. Two U.N. jeeps escorted us through the downtown capital over pot-holed roads lacking streetlights or signs and lined with shack-like stores and high walls. We sped alongside "tap-taps" (colorful trucks serving as buses), passing people burning garbage on the side of the road. It looked like organized chaos on the brink of unraveling at any moment.

"It was the strangest thing to see my wife speed off in a truck piled with thousands of dollars of medicine," Mark told me later.

When signing up for a service trip like this, it's important to trust your hosts. I knew from talking to Walsh that MTM was a strong organization.

Charles is Haitian, his wife, Beth, is from Indiana, and they have two young sons. In less than a decade, they've built a grade school and high school, a church and a clinic with visiting medical teams. They've helped the village secure a clean water source, increasing the annual crops from one to four and boosting the village's employment rate, according to Charles. Most people living around Gramothe now work as farmers or vendors and their children go to school.

The mountains were cooler and much less congested than the city. We stayed in Charles' home, a bright, airy two-story house. Because Mark and I were one of two married couples, we were given the boys' room. Our meals were cooked for us and the only "roughing it" to be done entailed sharing two bathrooms among 18 people. Most of us were women, and we quickly got over any modesty in order to get out the door in the morning.

We brought drinking water and peanut butter sandwiches for the day and piled into the back of a rickety pickup truck for the drive to the clinic, where a crowd of at least 40 would be awaiting our arrival each morning.

We served about 200 patients a day -- from morning until the sun went down -- in a clinic with no electricity. When our source of light disappeared in the late afternoon, we sometimes finished our work by headlamps.

We returned to the mission house in the evenings to eat dinner and talk about the day. (We never went out at night, except one evening when a baby was born in the village.)

Sometimes we sat on the porch beneath a sky full of stars, listening to faint music in the distance. Beth told me the tunes were coming from a voodoo ceremony.

As a pharmacy technician, I worked in crowded quarters lined with everything from donated medicine and vitamins to peanut butter. Three of us manned the pharmacy and we were constantly tripping over each other.

I counted out vitamins and quickly learned the staples: albendazole (to treat intestinal worms), permethrin cream (for scabies), amoxicillin, naproxen and eye drops.

We saw mostly mothers and children, but everyone who came to the clinic received treatment eventually. Prescription slips gave the names and ages of the patients; very few were over the age of 50, but there was an 80-year-old man who needed eye drops and Tums.

Charles explained to us that, unlike the villagers who had easier access to food, healthcare and clean water, the people who came to the clinic later in the week had sometimes walked two or three days for our help.

Unlike those working directly with patients in the clinic, my contact with people was limited to a translated conversation at the pharmacy window as I handed them their sacks of vitamins and medicine. Hungry for interaction, I quickly learned the Creole words for once a day -- une chaque jeu -- and other short phrases so I could look people in the eye as I spoke to them.

As I spent hours counting packs of vitamins, I realized we weren't treating illness as much as poverty. And I worried about the long-term value of what I was doing. As medical missions increase around the globe, there's a growing concern for continuity of care. If you start a patient on medicine for diabetes, for example, what good does that do them if their prescription runs out in three months and they can't get a refill?

Although I didn't realize it at the time, I was lucky to have chosen a mission with a medical clinic that hosted American and Canadian teams on a regular basis, providing consistent care to the locals.

Voluntourism is gaining popularity. A 2005 Travel Industry Association survey found that one in four travelers -- 47 percent of them between the ages of 35 and 47 -- are interested in taking a volunteer or service-based vacation. A Travelocity forecast poll this year noted that 38 percent of 1,000-plus survey respondents said they were interested in taking a vacation where they could make a difference.

While the numbers are growing, the idea isn't new. Mary Colleran of Chicago was an undergraduate student at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia during the mid-1990s when a friend told her about an alternative spring break trip to Appalachia with Habitat for Humanity.

"It seemed better than hanging out at my parents' house in New Jersey," Colleran said.

It turned out to be a good way for Colleran to meet both fellow students and locals, who all pitched in to build foundations for homes.

"It's fun to be tired at the end of the day from something that's really hard work," Colleran said.

A few years later she decided to take another trip with Habitat for Humanity -- this time to Tanzania. She filled out an online application and raised the $2,000 needed to cover the cost of the trip (not including airfare).

"Fundraising is not as daunting as it sounds," Colleran said. "People are happy to contribute, especially when they know you."

For two weeks, Colleran and her team of 11 others worked alongside villagers making bricks and roof shingles and painting several houses in Tanzania. The group relied on a Habitat slogan to get through the backbreaking labor.

"Any time they would assign us some really hard work," Colleran said, "one guy would yell, 'Vacation with a Purpose!' "

After their service stint was up, part of the group went on safari while Colleran joined an organized tour climbing up Mount Kilimanjaro.

Colleran has since volunteered on a post-Katrina clean-up crew in New Orleans and she'll leave next month on a half-year service trip that will take her through several countries with various organizations, including an organic farm in Italy, Habitat for Humanity in Hungary, tsunami relief in Thailand and an orphanage in Cambodia.

"If you're the type who can go into a country and sort of wing it, there are plenty of organizations and places who will take your help," Colleran said. "There's the logistics of visas and shots, but it's relatively easy -- especially with the Internet."

Colleran plans to blog about her experiences at www.voluntourists.blogspot.com.

Voluntourism doesn't have to mean all work and no play. On our final day in the Haitian clinic, a few second-year team members took over our duties in the pharmacy and we first-timers hopped into the back of the truck for an afternoon of sight-seeing.

We wove down the unpaved streets into Petionville, a suburb of Port-au-Prince. A week earlier it had looked like squalor to me. But after seven days in the mountains, I could tell from the buildings and the people's clothing that this was actually a wealthy suburb, relatively speaking.

After visiting an art gallery, we rode up to a lookout point above Port-au-Prince and the ocean. Vendors were everywhere selling cheap art. Charles advised us to pay only a quarter of what they asked. We managed to get even better deals when the truck stalled and the vendors practically crawled up on the platform to entice us.

It was just the latest in a long line of chaotic, fascinating and memorable experiences Mark and I had taken in over the past week in Haiti.

When the truck engine finally roared to a start and we rolled down the hill toward the main road, Mark took my dirty hand and said what we were both thinking: "The Caribbean leg of the honeymoon was the best part."

Felicia Schneiderhan is a Chicago-based free-lance writer.