Volunteer vacationers roll up their sleeves

KRASANG ROLEUNG, Cambodia -- Andrew Krupp doesn't speak a word of Cambodian. And, for the most part, the dozens of happy-faced children racing across the dusty schoolyard to greet him don't speak a word of English.

But that doesn't stop Krupp from winning them over immediately.

It doesn't take much, after all, to get across the basics of the hokeypokey, which it turns out is just as big a crowd-pleaser in the poorest thatched-roof villages of Cambodia as it is in the manicured suburb near Chicago where Krupp lives.

"I'm like a novelty act riding into town," says the 39-year-old manufacturing executive, laughing as his frenzied "right foot in" sends the children into hysterics. "Everybody loves a lunatic."

A lunatic with a mission. With the ever-energetic Krupp occupying the kids, his five traveling companions are free to grab hammers and saws and get down to the real task of the morning: building new eraser boards for the rural school's ramshackle classrooms.

It's a lot of work.

It's also their vacation.

A volunteer vacation, it's called — a type of trip that has gone from being on the fringe to the mainstream in just a few years.

Krupp and the others have signed up to visit Cambodia with GlobeAware, one of a growing number of organizations that design vacations for people who want to spend as much time helping in the destinations they visit as they spend seeing the major sites.

People such as Mary-Ellen Connolly, 46, of Chelsea, Quebec.

"I'm so sick of going to typical tourist attractions and doing the same old tourist thing," says Connolly, who volunteers at home teaching the visually impaired to ski and thought it would be fun to combine voluntarism with vacation.

Like the others here, Connolly says she wanted to "give back." But she also saw the allure of volunteering as a way to experience a country on a deeper level.

"I wanted to meet the local people," she says, "because that's the way to really know a country."

A scene from a Dickens novel

Connolly, a part-time accountant who left her children with her husband to take the trip with a friend, is talking outside an orphanage where the group spends every afternoon. In Siem Reap, the region's tourist hub, the tiny, run-down building houses 23 children in two rooms — one for girls, one for boys.