Youth overseas volunteer opportunities?

December 12, 2007 9:26 AM

My daughter is researching overseas volunteering opportunities, like this one. She would be saving up to do this her senior year of high school (she's 15 now). The idea is to live, learn, and serve within another culture. She's thinking she'd like to go with her mom. Anybody know anything about these kinds of packages? Any tips or recommendations or thoughts about her plans?

If she's going to spend several thousand dollars, I really want her to have an educational, safe, life-changing experience.

I know a lot of churches sponsor these, and we haven't really investigated that option yet, but will. Any thoughts on that type of experience welcome also.

posted by luser to Society & Culture (9 answers total)

Experiment in International Living is very well run, well established organization that does a wide variety of overseas experiences, including some that include community service. Usually the students live with a local family, so it would be just for your daughter, not your wife. I went as a student and I was encouraging my daughter to go as well.
posted by metahawk at 9:42 AM on December 12, 2007

Center for INterim Programs in Cambridge MA offers some of these, though I personally don't recommend them.

If she's interested in being in London, I had a good volunteer experience as a CSV. http://www.csv.org.uk/

They provide you housing and a stiped for your expenses, so you really only need to pay for your airfaire.
posted by chickaboo at 9:51 AM on December 12, 2007

I've known high school and college students who have gone on this program. I've also known people who've done basic study abroad in high school and college during the academic year, then found volunteer opportunities while there. None of those, as far as I know, allow the student to go with a parent. The point of many of these programs is to allow the child to function as a young adult, and develop a sense of self sufficiency and independence, which would be defeated by having a parent there. If it's the volunteering aspect that she wants, then she can do that locally. But if it's the living abroad that she wants, then she can look at all the different living abroad options, not just the ones that are tailored for volunteers.
posted by jujube at 10:00 AM on December 12, 2007

I have an ex-girlfriend who, the summer after high school, did the Cross Cultural Solutions volunteer thing in Dharamsala. She's Indian, but had never been to the Himalayan area before and really thought it was beautiful up there. She got to see the Dalai Lama. As for volunteering, I think her group taught young kids at local schools.

As for your daughter going with her mother, at least with CCS that doesn't seem to be abnormal. My ex went alone, but I remember that she met people of all various ages. There was a mother-daughter group, as well as a young hippie-ish married couple on their honeymoon. I remember she really thought the other volunteers were great.

I'm not necessarily endorsing CCS, as I have no firsthand experience with it and I remember my ex having some problems with the woman who ran it. However, despite those problems I know she really enjoyed herself.
posted by ecab at 10:20 AM on December 12, 2007

Oh and I didn't even notice jujube linking to Amigos. I have a friend who is a counselor at Amigos every summer somewhere in Latin America, I think Panama. She started out as a volunteer and has kept going back every year for a few years. She really loves it.
posted by ecab at 10:22 AM on December 12, 2007

I did the Cross-cultural solutions program with my mother when I was ~14. We spent a little time getting oriented and learning about the school system and so forth before being placed with a NGO where we did volunteer work. The CCS people mostly provided the orientation at the beginning and the apartment we and the other volunteers stayed in.

As far as I remember, the program was reasonably well run, but I had massive culture shock while I was there (outskirts of New Delhi). In retrospect, I'm still glad I went, but the difficulty of coping simultaneously with a new culture and severe poverty is definitely something to keep in mind. Your daughter sounds better-prepared than I was - I'd encourage her to keep reading about the place she'd like to go, and any volunteer stories she can find.
posted by lorimt at 11:41 AM on December 12, 2007

Amigos can be pretty great. I did two months in Mexico when I was 16. I spent the whole academic year before that summer learning Spanish and community development skills. My chapter (Boston) fundraised the money for our trips by selling oranges and grapefruit. So my parents didn't spend a cent. It was an amazing experience, and was part of the reason why I ended up doing the Peace Corps later on.
posted by Amizu at 1:17 PM on December 12, 2007

When I volunteered overseas I researched for months, it came down to Cross-culture solutions or a division of habitat for humanity called Global Village. I went with Global Village and was extremely happy. We spent a month in Ethiopia and everything was well prepared and safe. Though I use safe a little cautiously, my roommate got typhoid even though we all took our shots & vaccines before we left. The trip was planned so well and taught me a lot about how to travel in third world countries. I even feel confident enough now to go do all my traveling and volunteering in third world countries solo.

BTW: Ethiopia was an amazing place to do volunteer work. I feel confident in saying it has one of the most in depth and dynamic history compared to the rest of Africa. Birth of rastafarianism, Llabella ("Africa's Jerusalem"), never been colonized, coffee ceremonies, range of land scape (high plateaus to low plains), the Omo Valley (region where lip discs, scarring, etc is seen as beauty - i know you have seen the pictures in national geo).
posted by Black_Umbrella at 5:17 AM on December 13, 2007

GoAbroad is a good resource for finding similar programs. She could try investigating the Peace Boat, which has participants of all ages, though I'm not sure if they have jobs for non-Japanese speaking teenagers (they probably do...)
posted by divabat at 7:22 AM on December 13, 2007