Our pickup truck bumped and jostled down the unpaved path, the driver weaving around the deep pits and pot-holes by rote, each piece of this desert clearly as familiar to him as the lines on his darkly tanned hands. For twenty-five minutes we plodded a slow path through stark and open plains, the raw and honest surrounding beauty of Jordan’s Dana Biosphere Reserve.

With a minimum of movements, our Bedouin driver gestured deep into the Feynan Valley and with squinted eyes I was able to make out a desert colored structure sitting at the base of the valley and blending in naturally with the miles of pale orange sands surrounding our truck.

The smell of burning wood hit me first as I ducked through the entrance of the small house – ducking saved my head from earning yet another gash and also put me right at eye level with the beaming smile from the Guatemalan woman nervously wringing her hands in the center of the room. As I stood up tall on the other side of the doorway I abruptly found myself in the center of her house.

She was eager to show off her functioning stove and welcomed our requests to snap a few photos –she was proud. I was one of several volunteers who had hiked to a rural town outside of Xela, Guatemala to help with a stove building project in the region.

This week I welcome a guest post from Alex at World Reviewer.com – we swapped posts because I loved her idea about a look at the simple ways that we can give back to the community during the current holiday season. Some are exceeding simple to execute, so why not read through and find even just one way to give back to worthy causes and those a bit less fortunate ; volunteering and donating feels good and Alex suggestion are easily implementable. Would love to know what ways you and …

Two weeks ago I was playing around on Facebook as a way to procrastinate the real work I should have been doing when a chat window popped up – from a sweet young woman I met at the orphanage in Cambodia where I volunteered more than a year and a half ago.
Many of the older girls at the orphanage asked for my email and Facebook details at the time and we have very sporadically kept in touch, talking every month or so, mostly just quick hellos and messages from them …

I’ve been home in the US for about a week now and just today recovered from an amazingly awesome case of jetlag. The moment I touched down in Los Angeles the Geek Borg (that’s what we’re calling the team :-) has been working at organizing the details of the hackathon that’s just three weeks away and we also identified three easy ways for the travel and coder communities to support GWOB.org – read on for how you guys can get involved!
On my side of things, GWOBorg (that means me too) is …

The last two weeks have manifested the largest shift in my “life” plans in more than two years. In June 2008 I made the decision to sell everything I own buy a one-way ticket to Australia with only vague plans of traveling around the world for a year – that plan worked out really well for me (if I do say so myself!) and I have been traveling on-and-off for the past two years.
The plan for the coming months was to live and work out of Bali. Those plans have …

One full hour after starting our project we finally had the first layer of concrete blocks nestled next to each other, absolutely perfectly level and arranged in a large rectangular shape. Mitul and Grace, also volunteers from the Pop Wuj language school in Guatemala, carefully scrapped at the wet red clay while I was nearby hefting up each and every concrete block into tubs of pond water, allowing each block to soak for 10 minutes before taking it to Mitul and Grace. These concrete blocks were the first step toward …

It’s the warmth and sheer, innocent love that emanates from children that draws me back to volunteering over and over again.
My first ride to the guardería, or day care center, took me 20 minutes outside of Xela and into the significantly more petite town of Llanos del Pinal, a small village nestled under the cloud capped Santa Maria volcano. That first day I walked into the guardería I was completely at a loss for what this experience would entail and had the those first-day-of-school jitters as I walked toward …