Family Volunteering Vacations

June 8, 2004 -- A family vacation can be doubly rewarding when it's combined with doing good works. "Volunteer vacation" options for families range from trips as close to home as a state park to destinations as distant and exotic as Tahiti or Sri Lanka.

Be it volunteer work in a Costa Rican cloud forest or in South Dakota's Black Hills, the formula is roughly the same. Families put in work time, but get fun time as well. It's often a Monday through Friday work week with weekends off for exploring. There often are late afternoon weekday breaks for local sightseeing as well. A park volunteer might work part time and still have time for a short hike or a little fishing.

A volunteering vacation can be costly, but the rewards can be quite plentiful, as well. Lisa and Kevin Kaija of Reading, Vt., took their five children to a small village in the Costa Rican rain forest over the Christmas holidays.

They spent two weeks building a retaining wall around a school yard in an ongoing project intended to transform a mud patch into a grassy school yard for local children to play in. The Kaija children, ranging in age from 13 to 5-year-old twins, helped with tasks such as pushing wheelbarrows, mixing cement by hand, scraping, painting, planting grass and preparing meals.

They also found themselves drawn into the community, becoming close friends with village children. Thirteen-year-old Gretchen was invited to sleep over at one of her new friends' houses and learned to make tamales from scratch, starting with grinding corn.

Eight-year-old Oliver clicked with a village boy about his age. Dad Kevin spoke no Spanish, but loved the hard, physical labor and the comradely rhythm he developed with village workers. Gretchen described the vacation as a transforming experience that made her thankful for all that she has.

The wet climate made the project muddy work and the children adored that, according to Lisa. "It gave them permission to be muddy all day long," she says.