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 …
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. Then, a decade later, it …
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 …
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 …
Royal Chitwan National Park is a crowning jewel of Nepal, and it’s also one of the country’s most successful conservation projects. It’s notably a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and therefore under international protection. During my month of volunteering outside of Kathmandu, I had only heard good things about Chitwan from the young monks; I was …
When I first booked my trip to spend three days at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Royal Chitwan National Park, I had visions of trekking through the jungles to spy on tigers and dodge wild rhinos. Turns out, the adventuring at Chitwan doesn’t go quite that far. I did see one of the rare one-horned rhinos, …
When I booked my volunteer experience to teach English to young monks in Nepal all those months before landing there, I could not have known what waited for me when I touched down in the country. I knew stories of trekking in the Himalayas. I knew of the deep and rich history in Kathmandu. But …
My volunteer travels in Nepal started with sightseeing around the Kathmandu Valley. I loved this part. Sightseeing gave my me a jump-start of sorts into the Nepali Buddhist culture into which my cousin and I were immersing ourselves for two months. We toured Kathmandu for a few days and we took a crash-course in Nepali language. …