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Volunteering holidays on the tours
A Thai volunteer teaching in a Lisu village : A Thai volunteer and her Lisu students in outdoor class
Doing something for the community you visit - volunteering
As a traveller and a tourist with time and desire to help others you are invited to
take part in a kind of doing something back to the place where you are visiting.
Volunteering does not need to be a month long program.
There are almost endless opportunities to give a thing useful to communities,
from half an hour of repairing a bamboo bridge or a week in a village farm.
The chances are open to all,
both young and old senior citizens. Senior elderly people may want to
deliver some of their vast amount of life long experience, knowledge and lessons
which will be very useful to everyone of us.
All of our nature and monority ethnic village visiting trips already include do it yourself and
taking part in the tours by tourists themselves to an extent. For example during a normal nature walk through
tribal villages trekkers (tourists) can take part in:
- repairing bridge, fence, rice or corn storage huts, toilet, water supply system
- growing rice, corn or vegetable
- harvesting rice, corn or fruits and vegetable
- post harvesting activities such as storage, winowing, treshing, pounding
- carrying things from place to place
- picking water
- teaching (language such as Japanese, Chinese, Thai, English; or Math, Drawing, Arts, Painting, Ecology, ... )
and the list goes on. Language teaching might take a bit longer time period
From the elderly people there are a lot of things younger persons want to listen. Their wealth of
experience and knowledge along with skills and lessons will surely be very useful for us one way or another.
There are times each day to chat and communicate among us and with the people of the community,
around a kitchen fire, camp fire, over a dinner table, under the moon at candle-lit camp.
These venues are good places to listen to the senior people. In addition tourists can also exchange
things and ideas on culture and life styles or whatever with the local folks.
A Myanmar (Burmese) volunteer going out with a Lisu villager to fetch water
Trips with volunteering actions:
If you want a plan that is designed especially for volunteering we are more than happy to help you
arrange such a trip. At this time we arrange semi volunteering trips. These are combination of
touring and working for the locals and or environment. Nearly at all places where we operate we
can add partial volunteering actions. It is not just in the
local towns and villages; it could be in the mountains and jungle too.
Example: 3 days mountain hiking trip with volunteering for nature/environment management
Day 1: Meet and discussion at the starting station, and travel to the trail head. Nature walk to the first night camp.
During the walk we can do:
- collect garbage, burn some of them if it can be done safely
- we can make measurement and put meters or kilometers tags on large trees
- take photos of trees, plants, forest floor, landscape, animal foot prints, and write logs of what you see and hear, weather and plants records
- using gps, maps, magnetic compass to locate the points and stations along the trail
Day 2: Walking to another camp site, doing similar activities as above. If we see fit we could also think, design
and build a clean environmentally friendly toilet for tourists
Day 3: Walking to the end of the trail. On this last day we shall do:
- similar to above, dispose of some garbage we bring at the proper station at the park's office or village
- send the final report to the national park or wild life sanctuary office for their record and future use.
- send the mapping data to the office and take part in the drawing of trail on the map
In many of the tours cum volunteering or voluntourism programs you will also learn 'the things to know' while
staying with the local community, from the villagers.
When we look into these 'giving back to the community' activities
we will clearly see that these are actually win win programs. Volunteers themselves will also gain
a lot of informaton, local knowledge, cultural and natural knowledge, as well as skill and personal enrichment,
not to mention your own satisfaction, friendship gains, and improvement in self confidence.
If you are interested to do please include in the email or inquiry you send to us and tell us something about
yourself, what you think you can do, etc.
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