Blog

This post is written by our good friend and intercultural competency expert, Emily Braucher of Refresh Communication, with some ideas on how travelers and volunteers can ensure they engage in mindful communication across cultures and settings.   1. Don’t trust your...

Our last two blog posts have been the inspirational life story of Sushil Babu Chhetri (here and here). In this post we asked Sushil to give us his candid thoughts on some of the issues he touches upon in his story.   Much of your childhood was spent in orphanages. Do...

In Part Two of his emotional recounting of his life story, Sushil Babu Chhetri talks about how he escaped an abusive orphanage and found his way into the work he does today. (Find Part One here!)   Escape Our chance to escape the orphanage involved an American family...

Today's guest post is from Sarah Swank, who recalls her first experience of voluntourism and why she now advocates for a very different style of travel. Volunteering has been a part of my life as long as I can remember. For about 10 years, I served as an acolyte,...

Alice Robinson reflects on a volunteer trip in Sri Lanka that she went on as a teenager and how it motivated her in editing the Learning Service book.   When I was fifteen, I signed up for a three week international volunteering trip to Sri Lanka. It was organised by...

This is a guest post from Catherine Cottam, who volunteered at an orphanage in Kenya in 2012, about how this experience went on to shape her views and activism. I was studying for my Masters in School Counseling when I first thought about volunteering abroad. I really...

This is a guest post by Weh Yeoh, who talks about how charities need to need to work themselves out of a job to be sustainable. “Well yeah, of course that makes sense. If you don’t plan your own departure from Cambodia, you’re just going to be stuck there forever....

Marion Taylor is the founder of Taylor The Gap, a gap year consultancy for students. Here she talks about what she has learned through her own experiences in traveling and volunteering abroad.   Like in many of the personal experiences shared in Learning Service: The...