BootsnAll Travel Community

I have looked at several internet volunteer sites and it seems that kids are not welcome in most organized volunteer sites - I am thinking that I will have to approach organizations separately. Both the husband and I would like to work with kids where our two could join us. I figure that we could either hire a babysitter or one of us could take off in the afternoons if the kids get squirley. It would be more like a 1.5 adult for 1 deal.

Tell me how you gave back...

Hi! We know exactly what you are talking about. Your letter doesn't define where you are looking to go, but we recently came back from taking our four kids to Thailand, living with a Thai family, and having everyone participating in teaching high school English... and here's the catch... for very little money. Sound good? Feel free to contact us and we can tell you more. In the meantime you could check out www.volunthai.com and see if that is a potential fit.

Ours sound like they were older (8, 10, 13) than yours when we volunteered.

During the day, my wife and I helped the organization with admin. Our kids joined local kids their own age in the daycare programs - arts & crafts, reading, games etc. Our middle child thrived on this. She helped out and really enjoyed it. The other two found it very difficult to do that, so they came back and worked with us.

We took our 5 year-old daughter to Paraguay, SA for 5 months last year. After getting pretty much the same "no kids welcome" from the big organizations, we ended up hooking up with a missionary from a local church. We're not religious or part of the church, and we had an unbelievably great time. We paid for our flights, and then got food and accommodations for about $150. Pretty inexpensive.

What turned out to work for us was to just focus on going somewhere with lots of kids. Our daughter spent her whole day playing with local kids, and going to school. She learned to speak Spanish, and had a superb time.

Anyway - I guess the lesson for us was that many of the big organizations have an expensive infrastructure, or are accepting volunteers to fund their organization. In the end, you can pay a lot to volunteer, or you can pay very little and get the same experience. It pays to consider everything, particularly small things.

We found our opportunity from a leaflet on a local bulletin board. They were collecting shoes to take to Paraguay, so I emailed the address on the flyer. We basically had coffee a couple of times, got the relevant details, and headed out a few months later. For us, coffee and a handshake, with a dash of intuition turned into one fantastic, affordable family adventure!