Click here for all the details on how to Volunteer Abroad in our Volunteer Abroad Lowdown.

It’s a common yearning these days: After 9/11, the dot-com shakeout, and obscene corporate scandals, our generation wants to do something that matters, leave our mark on the world, and make a difference in people’s lives. But while this can seem like just a vague, elusive dream, it is actually entirely within your reach. Now.

I reached out last summer to volunteer at a day camp for refugee children near Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, in Central Asia through Volunteers for Peace (www.vfp.org). I had been traveling before but had become a little disillusioned with the backpacking routine and felt it was time for me to give back. Why would I, or anyone, want to give up “vacation” travel time in order to get to work? If you have to think long and hard for an answer to this question, you might not be ready to volunteer. For myself, I was drawn by the opportunity to interact with new people on a direct level, and get my hands dirty (often quite literally.) Sure, you could intern your summer away with 80-hour weeks at Morgan Stanley, but you’ll have the rest of your life to work in an office if that’s what you choose to do. Fine, it’s great to backpack the circuit and tell everyone you visited the Louvre, the Uffizi, and the Prado, but what makes a deeper impression on yourself, and the world, when compared with stories of planting trees in the Brazilian rain forest, or helping to rebuild a monastery in Greece, or teaching world geography to kids in the steppes of Kyrgyzstan?

GETTING DIRTY AND LOVING IT
What you do as a volunteer depends on where you choose to go. Be flexible—if you want to work with kids, be open about the locations you’re willing to visit. If you positively have to be in Mongolia, remember that you might be laying brick in the garden of a monastery, not cleaning up a sunny beach. The most important thing is to keep an open mind. You’re not going to change the world (at least not overnight). You’ll be making changes on a much smaller—but no less important—level. Generally, volunteer programs fall into a few categories: environmental (you clean up), educational (you teach), restorative (you rebuild), conservational (you plant and protect), and humanitarian/community development (you work with people). Programs can range from one-week stints to sojourns of more than six months, or you canswing for the fences with the two-year Peace Corps program.

I spent two weeks at a day camp fully in Humanitarian/Kid Control mode. With 35 pre-adolescents bouncing off the camp’s stucco walls with excitement, the ten other volunteers and I organized sports and games, taught English classes and did anything we could think of to keep the kids occupied and smiling. I never remember Duck-Duck-Goose being so much fun.

Their families had fled civil war in neighboring Tajikistan several years earlier, but many of these kids seemed not to notice words like refugee and assimilation; they were too busy showing off their enthusiastic jump shots in our daily pick-up basketball games, raising their hands eagerly during English lessons, and reciting world capitals in geography demonstrations.

Typical mornings began with English alphabet recitations and basic conversational language classes, divided by age and language. After an hour, the kids were restless from sitting, and we’d break into groups for soccer or basketball in the nearby field. At lunchtime, we were served meat-and-potatoes meals (often quite literally) in the cafeteria, though generally the volunteers sat together and the children had their own table. Luckily, there were no food fights. After lunch was group song time, when we taught them American and British childhood songs. “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” was a favorite because they all loved making the animal sounds.

KARMA AND CURRENCY
The types of volunteer programs out there are as varied (and nearly as numerous) as the countries you can visit. Program fees range from $200 to upwards of $2,000, and the amenities, comforts, and flexibility of each differ greatly, so it pays to do a bit of research before signing up. As a general rule, the program costs will include lodging and board, but not international airfare. Some of the more economical organizations, such as VFP, are fairly hands-off: You select from a list of available programs and apply to the one you are interested in. I preferred this more laissez-faire approach, but only because I had very little money to spend and already knew precisely where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do. Other groups can sometimes personally match your interests and skills with programs around the world, and many of the pricier, more personalized organizations have a knowledgeable program coordinator on-site to meet you upon arrival and ensure that your entire experience runs smoothly, as well as nice-to-haves like 24=7 emergency support and health insurance. One of the larger companies, i to i (www.i-to-i.com) even lodges many volunteers with families, which can contribute immensely to your immersion in the culture. You can put all your energy into positive karma, and not have to worry about transportation, bureaucracy, and most importantly, whether your time and money will be usefully spent (they always screen volunteer projects to work with the most applicable local organizations). This might be a best bet for first-timers going abroad. First you will need to figure out what your budget is and then decide how much personal attention you want while in-country.

NO SE HABLA...?
Volunteer organizations rarely require that you speak the local language—there just aren’t that many fluent Hungarian or Swahili speakers around. The language spoken on many programs is usually, but not always, English. Some organizations, like I-to-I, will give you basic language lessons during your orientation. Obviously, though, it helps to know a little of the local tongue, so if you’re not able to take a semester or two of the language in school, be sure to pick up a phrasebook before you leave. Rough Guides, Lonely Planet, and Berlitz all sell phrasebooks for most of the major tongues.

Only two of the volunteers at our camp spoke any Russian, the lingua franca of the Central Asian republics. Most of us communicated with the children through gestures and body language, but this often only accentuated the complexity: To understand the other person, you really had to make a concerted effort to listen to them. Our hand-waving and face-making certainly was cause for some laughter, but it brought us closer to the kids we were working with.

SHAKESPEARE IN THE STEPPES, OR CLOSE ENOUGH
As volunteers, we took turns cleaning up after meals and doing basic housework in our dorm rooms. At night, after the children had gone home, we had free time to walk into town and try out the national drink, Kumys, a strong, bitter brew made from fermented mare’s milk, or sit outside and tell stories or sing American and Russian songs with the local camp organizers. Because there were so few of us, we all became very close as a group: I even met up several months ago in London with one of the British volunteers, and I have plans to visit two Czech girls from the program later this year.

On the last day, the kids put on a performance—several songs and skits that we had been rehearsing with them for several days. We’re not talking Samuel Beckett here; it took nearly an entire day to get them to learn the words to “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands.” But by dress rehearsal, most of them could sing and act out the songs, and several even threw together their own traditional dance routine, performed in national costume. Fortunately, the local camp organizers were able to translate our stage directions for the children into either Russian or Kyrgyz. We invited their parents, along with the mayor of the town, to come see them perform. Not everyone was able to hit the right notes or remember their lines, but certainly everyone continues to remember our time together.

Click here for all the details on how to Volunteer Abroad in our Volunteer Abroad Lowdown.