I love to travel! While I enjoy taking in a few famous sights now and then, I often become easily exhausted by the mainstream, tourist-trap style of traveling. I truly enjoy experiencing a location like a local does. I want to shop where the locals shop, I want to eat what the locals eat, and most importantly I want to get to know the locals! I believe that our experience of a new city or country is shaped by the people we come into contact with there. This is how I wanted to get to know Brussels, Belgium!
Volunteer travel plays a critical role for me in this way. It allows me to immerse myself in a new place by getting my hands dirty with the locals, while hopefully making a small difference in one little pocket of the world. For me, it feels like I’m getting the “behind the scenes” tour. I feel so much more intimately connected with a place when I am able to interact with it, rather than just view it through the lens of a camera.
And while traveling to a foreign country can indeed be daunting, knowing that I have a community to bond with when I arrive eases a lot of the tension found in traveling into the unknown. This is why I love volunteer travel and see myself making a habit of embarking on many more of these volunteer adventures!