Volunteer for Vacation and See the Real World

Question: Why would anyone of sound mind want to work during vacation and pay for the privilege?

Answer: To feel the breezes of Fiji and play with the fishes. To enjoy a fresh baguette and a bowl of bittersweet cafe au lait under a new-born sun in the French Alps. To be transformed from suburban housewife and mother of three into someone who has dug ditches in Nicaragua and learned that the people aren’t simply “Communists, Contras or Sandinistas . . . they are Julia, Juana, Ramon and Carlos.” To cradle a baby orangutan in your arms while the rain forest of Borneo steams up around you and the local insects scratch out tunes of mystery.

“It’s a vacation with a purpose. And while you are doing something, you enjoy all the beauty and scenery of an untraveled area,” according to John Lucas, who has taken a volunteer vacation. He is talking about vacations to which he and others have contributed time and money. They pay their own expenses and help complete scientific, ecological and social service projects for organizations that can’t afford to hire help.

Some projects are near home. Others are baked beneath the stars in distant and exotic places.

Lots of Adventure

They can range from excavating medieval ruins in the French Alps to planting trees for the U.S. Forest Service to building churches in East Africa to tracking down turtle nests for a study on the reproductive patterns of an endangered species in Quintana Roo, Mexico.

Conditions, projects and costs vary. On Lucas’ trip, sleeping accommodations were aboard a boat floating on the crystal sea off Fiji. Dinner was prepared by a cook. Other travelers on other projects peppered around the world, however, sleep in tents and share dinner from cans which they open themselves. Costs range from about $500 to more than $2,000 for a project, plus transportation expense between home and the project site.

“You have to be flexible. This project in Fiji was relatively luxurious in the sense that we had beds and a cook,” Lucas said. “There are a lot of projects where you’re out in the rough in sleeping bags and cooking for yourself.”

Special Skills

Some projects require skills such as scuba certification. Some require good physical condition. Since projects are done in groups, an ability to get along with people in close contact is useful.

“You need to be able to deal with situations you’re not used to--situations that can be as simple as the food you eat,” Lucas said.

And you should be interested in the project. The 25-year-old Lucas, who teaches learning disabled students at the Landmark West school in Culver City, has applied to medical school. With that in mind, he looked for a project tied to medicine.

The 10-day University Research Expeditions Program (based at the University of California in Berkeley, but part of the entire University of California system) was exactly what he wanted.

Three Dives a Day

The program with which he became linked was involved in determining whether the chemicals in sponges could be used in medical treatment of humans.

Lucas and others on the trip took three dives a day, collecting samples of sponges and tunicates, which are sponge cousins. The sponges will be analyzed, and knowledge of their chemical basis used for experiments later.

“There was a lot of intellectual stuff, but I have a slide of all of us near the end of the trip,” Lucas said. “We were dressed in sarongs with this colored zinc oxide on our faces . . . trying unsuccessfully to look Polynesian.”

Then, too, there was dancing until dawn. “Those weren’t intellectual pursuits . . . at least not in their purest forms.”

While Lucas was spurred by career goals, Ione Rice, who will be 80 in August and took her first trip seven years ago, had other needs in mind.

Finches in Costa Rica

She just left on her 23rd project, this one to Fiji. She can converse with equal dexterity on Mayan history, whales, horseshoe crabs, dolphins, the leatherback turtles of St. Croix and the finches of Costa Rica. Her travels have been through Earthwatch, a Watertown, Mass.-based organization that sponsors more than 100 expeditions around the world.

“Do you know what a dolphin feels like?” she asks. It is not a rhetorical question. “They feel like silk. They’re slippery.”

After a short lecture on a trip to Borneo to study orangutans, she said: “They don’t like being followed and they’ll throw fruit at you. The first time they throw fruit the size of baseballs, you learn to get out of the way.”

Her reasons for participating in volunteer vacations have a lot to do with ecology, history and the betterment of mankind and nature. But the bottom line for Rice is: “I like any trip where I learn something.”

Betty Meyskens, a self-described “Rockwell painting come to life,” choose a voyage to Nicaragua with Habitat for Humanity, a nonprofit Christian housing ministry that no longer accepts short-term volunteers.

Not for Everyone

In a book called “Volunteer Vacations,” by Bill McMillon (Chicago Review Press, $11.95), Meyskens chronicled the voyage from her world into life in Nicaragua.

Among her observations: “The people of Nicaragua have faces and names. We talked together for 18 days. We hugged together. We sang ‘La Bamba’ together under the stars. We slung picks in the hard, dry earth. They are not the enemy.”

In his book, McMillon has collected a variety of adventures and volunteer-vacation organizations and put them into a directory.

A veteran of volunteer vacations himself, McMillon thinks such outings appeal to three types of people: those with a consuming interest in a subject, those with a need to serve others through social work and those who are somewhat dissatisfied with their lives.

Clearly, volunteer vacations are not a pastime for everyone.

If giant cockroaches with antennae the size of chopsticks make you uncomfortable, perhaps a rain forest should not be your next vacation destination. But if you yearn for a trip that could retint the colors of your perception, a volunteer vacation might be just your style.

There’s one other thing.

Question: Is it true that you get back what you put into life?

Answer: It must be. Many volunteer vacations are a tax write-off.

For more information on Earthwatch, write the western regional office, 861 Via de la Paz, Suite G, Pacific Palisades 90272, phone (213) 459-0303, or contact the headquarters, 680 Mt. Auburn St., Box 403, Watertown, Mass. 02272, phone (617) 926-8200.

For more information on the University Research Expeditions Program, write University of California, Berkeley 94720, phone (415) 642-6586.