The 100 Best Volunteer Vacations to Enrich Your Life Part 2

Wa.s.saw Island is a 10,053-acre national wildlife refuge with rolling dunes, live oaks, vast salt marshes, and a 6-mile-long beach where the female loggerheads sneak in each summer to lay nests of 120 eggs the size of Ping-Pong b.a.l.l.s. Getting there requires a 45-minute boat ride from Landings Harbor Marina on Skidaway Island.

CANNONb.a.l.l.s AND TURTLE EGGS.

During the Civil War, Wa.s.saw was occupied at different times by both Confederate and Union soldiers. Blowing sands once revealed the complete skeleton of a soldier, along with a .56-caliber bullet and a b.u.t.ton from the uniform of the First Georgia Regiment. Cannonb.a.l.l.s have been found along the full length of the island's northern end.

Well before the war, though, in the early 1800s, the island was owned by Anthony Odingsell, a black planter who listed 11 slaves among his possessions. In 1866, the island was purchased by George Parsons, a wealthy entrepreneur, who built the existing housing compound as a hideaway for his family and friends. In October 1969, after 103 years of Parsons family owners.h.i.+p, the island was sold to the Nature Conservancy for one million dollars. The Conservancy, in turn, deeded the land to the U.S. Department of the Interior to be managed as a wildlife refuge. For this transaction, though, the cost was the princely sum of one dollar.

In 1898, during the Spanish-American War, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers supervised the construction of Fort Morgan on Wa.s.saw Island's north end. Though portions of the fort, which was built by civilians, survive today, it is threatened due to erosion.

Volunteers stay in a rustic cabin (no air-conditioning or indoor showers). Because turtles lay their eggs at night-it's safer that way-turtle patrol usually begins around nightfall and lasts until roughly 5 a.m. Daytime is when you'll sleep and have free time to explore, hike the island's many dirt roads, swim in the pool, and go bird-watching. Not only does Wa.s.saw support rookeries for egrets and herons, but a variety of wading birds also show up each summer.

Volunteers pay $750 per week. This includes transportation to and from Skidaway Island, a cabin bunk, and all meals.

HOW TO GET IN TOUCH.

Caretta Research Project, P.O. Box 9841, Savannah, GA 31412, 912-447-8655, www.carettaresearchproject.org.

GESUNDHEIT! INSt.i.tUTE.

help transform health care.

HILLSBORO, WEST VIRGINIA.

The best medical thing we can do for patients is help them develop grand friends.h.i.+p skills and find meaning in their lives.

-Dr. Patch Adams, founder of Gesundheit!

7 The fact that comedian Robin Williams was chosen to play Patch Adams in the eponymous 1998 movie about his life should be your first clue that Dr. Adams is not your average M.D. and that the Gesundheit! Inst.i.tute that he started in rural West Virginia is not your run-of-the-mill hospital. Situated amid beautiful mountains, hardwood forests, and at least three waterfalls, Gesundheit! is a holistic hospital and health-care community based on the radical notion that medicine should actually be fun and free.

Whether you saw the movie or not, it's probably obvious by now that a volunteer vacation to Patch's 317-acre inst.i.tute promises to be unorthodox and extraordinary. Although the "silly hospital" that Patch envisioned is still on the drawing board, there's an active community of artists, dreamers, healers, and clowns interested in changing the medical paradigm. They're living at the inst.i.tute, preparing the land, and building the community that will sustain the hospital once it is built. Volunteers of all stripes are welcome.

A significant component of the Gesundheit! experience is education. Programs are based on Patch's vision for world peace, social justice, and the recognition that the health of the individual cannot be separated from the health of the community. The idea is that volunteers should learn about Gesundheit!'s utopian ideas so they can return to their homes and spread the vision.

WACKY HOSPITAL.

The 40-room Gesundheit! Hospital will be completely free, with no malpractice insurance and no third-party insurance. If you think that's wacky, you ought to get a load of the architectural blueprints. A giant ear sticks off one end of the building and giant feet mark the entrance. Below the main hospital floor, there's a waterway that allows people to travel from one end to the other via paddleboat. Beautiful murals cover the walls, toys line the floors, and secret doorways and slides add mystique and amus.e.m.e.nt.

NUT-WORKING.

For 35 years, Patch Adams has been involved in what he calls "clown healing work." He and a posse of clowns have visited hospitals on every continent, and often go to places where few dare to venture, for what he calls "humanitarian clowning." Since 1984, he has taken clowns to Russia each year for two weeks of clowning in hospitals, orphanages, prisons, and nursing homes. The clowns now go on six to eight overseas missions per year. For instance: In 2006, Patch and 45 clowns and 8 builders constructed a seven-room clinic in Perquin, El Salvador.

Patch and 22 clowns from six continents took 10 tons of aid into war-torn Afghanistan.

Patch took clowns into both Bosnia and the Kosovo refugee camps.

His merry band has brought joy to Romanian AIDS orphanages.

Patch took a team of 17 clowns to Cuba.

Patch and his clowning pals have visited African refugee camps.

In 2006, Patch took clowns to tsunami relief camps in Sri Lanka.

While living at the Gesundheit! Inst.i.tute, volunteers might prepare fresh whole foods for the three dozen or so attendees of the inst.i.tute's annual School for Designing a Society or build a deck on the back of the barn or collect buckets of sugar maple sap. For their community service projects, they might don red noses for clowning at the Pocahontas Care Center in Marlinton or pick up trash along U.S. 219 between Locust Creek Road and Hillsboro.

Every year, the inst.i.tute hosts work camps, visitor weekends (where volunteers work for a day or two) as well as an increasing number of educational offerings. For example, medical students come each year to learn about medicinal herbs, health-care clowning, and other topics pertinent to Patch's vision of integrating medicine with fun, art, and friends.h.i.+p.

Patch's big, crazy dream began in 1971 when he and a couple of other doctors opened a free hospital located in Arlington, Virginia. It was a six-bedroom house where Patch and 20 adults (including two other docs) lived and practiced medicine. Their "zany hospital" was open 24/7, for all manner of medical problems. They saw 500 to 1,000 people each month, including many who took up residence. Patch called the pilot project "ecstatic, fascinating, and stimulating." After nine years of no donations and being refused for some 1,400 foundation grants, the project was finally disbanded. Dr. Adams, of course, persevered, making, as he describes it, a deal with "the devil"-to cooperate with the movie and get some publicity for his project.

Volunteers are needed at the Gesundheit! Inst.i.tute from April through October with a minimum commitment of one month. In exchange for 35 hours of work per week, Gesundheit! provides room and board. Some of the positions include gardeners, cooks, builders, and housekeepers. If you can't spare a month, consider the Visitor Weekend Program or a short-term work camp, which could involve such service work as organic gardening, s.h.i.+take mushroom gathering, composting toilet building, or even answering phones. All three options are-you guessed it-completely free.

HOW TO GET IN TOUCH.

Gesundheit! Inst.i.tute, P.O. Box 268, Hillsboro, WV 24946, 304-653-4338, www.patchadams.org.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT MEDORA FOUNDATION.

help run a booming tourist town.

MEDORA, NORTH DAKOTA.

We are, each of us, angels with only one wing; and we can only fly by embracing one another.

-Luciano de Crescenzo, Italian writer and actor.

8 To hear Teddy Roosevelt tell it, Medora, a ranching town in western North Dakota, was the "romance of his life." In fact, he used to say that if it wasn't for his experience in North Dakota, he'd have never been elected President. Roosevelt first showed up in the North Dakota badlands for a buffalo hunt in 1883, when he was a young New York politician. He liked the area so much that he eventually bought two ranches, the Maltese Cross, just south of Medora, and Elkhorn, 35 miles north.

Medora today is still a mystical place where people come because, like Roosevelt said, it has the power to change your life. In the winter, the little community has barely a hundred people, mostly folks who ranch or manage the Theodore Roosevelt National Park or the government business of being the Billings County seat. But in the summer, when folks are out of school or off work, they flock from all over the country to Medora in droves. Something like 300,000 show up during any given summer.

Needless to say, that's far too big a crowd for the permanent residents to be able to feed and house and sell souvenirs to all of them. So, in 1998, the Theodore Roosevelt Medora Foundation, a nonprofit organization that promotes the area, came up with the brilliant scheme of bringing in volunteers who could serve the locally famous pitchfork fondue (steaks speared on nickel-plated pitchforks and cooked over a campfire in a cauldron of boiling oil); usher at the Burning Hills Amphitheater, a 2,900-seat theater that since 1958 has been presenting the high-energy Medora Musical; staff the Harold Schafer Heritage Center; clear tables at the Chuckwagon Buffet; and greet tourists at the information center. Preseason volunteers get the town ready for its summer close-up.

The volunteer season runs from mid-May to mid-September and is divided into three segments. If you come in mid-May, you'll be in charge of painting, planting flowers, and sprucing up the little town with its wooden sidewalks, split-rail fences, barn-board buildings, and wooden benches. This perfectly coiffed town could easily double as Disneyland's Frontierland. Those volunteer stints run for five days. If you time your visit right, you'll be able to catch the Cowboy Poetry Gathering on Memorial Day weekend.

SPEAKING OF NORTH DAKOTA AND VOLUNTEERING.

If you didn't get enough of Lewis and Clark during their recent bicentennial celebration, you're in luck. There's another volunteer opportunity in North Dakota at Fort Mandan, the historic North Dakota wintering ground for the intrepid explorers in 180405. It was at the Mandan-Hidatsa Indian village (now called Fort Mandan) that Lewis and Clerk met Sacagawea, the Native American woman who made their historic journey possible. During their five months in North Dakota, longer than they stayed anywhere else, Lewis and Clark interviewed many Mandan Indians and drew maps from the tales they were told.

From May through October, Fort Mandan and the North Dakota Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center in Washburn, North Dakota, invite volunteers with RVs to partic.i.p.ate in what they call the Extended-Stay Volunteer Program. Volunteers come for eight-day or one-month stints during which they water trees, wash picnic tables, escort tour groups through the fort and interpretive center, and more. In return for their services, usually about 20 hours a week, volunteers get a free RV site with full hookups and discounts in the gift shop and at local attractions. Lewis & Clark Fort Mandan Foundation, P.O. Box 607, Washburn, ND 58577, 877-462-8535 or 701-462-8535, www.fortmandan.com.

Starting in June, when the musical kicks off, volunteers come for eight-day "terms" to do everything from answering questions at the Medora Doll House-an antique doll museum housed in the old home of the Marquis de Mores, the guy who founded Medora back in 1883-to pa.s.sing out programs at the Old Town Hall Theater for the one-man show on the life of Roosevelt, aptly ent.i.tled Bully. Around August 15, after the college kids have all returned to school, volunteers even take over such end-of-season duties as catering, running the Bully Pulpit Golf Course, and managing the retail establishments.

In return for roughly six hours of work a day, the foundation provides volunteers with a room at the Spirit of Work Lodge and a name badge (complete with photo) that allows them to eat free at the Maltese Burger, Chuckwagon's all-you-can eat buffet, or the Badlands Pizza Parlor.

When the staff of the Theodore Roosevelt Medora Foundation launched the volunteer program in 1998, they received 44 applications for the 16 positions. Today, more than 400 volunteers show up each year, 22 per week from early June through the first of September.

There is no charge to volunteer, but you do have to get your dibs in early. As of press time, more than 800 people had already signed on to the volunteer list for the 2009 season.

HOW TO GET IN TOUCH.

Theodore Roosevelt Medora Foundation, P.O. Box 198, 301 Fifth Street, Medora, ND 58645, 800-633-6721 or 701-623-4444, www.medora.com.

ANOTHER THOUGHTFUL COMMITTED CITIZEN: KIANA SEARS.

To Kiana Sears, a manager with the Arizona Corporation Commission, volunteering is something that comes naturally, like brus.h.i.+ng her teeth or hugging her daughters. "I grew up in New Orleans and my mom was always volunteering for something or another. Many a Sat.u.r.day when I was a young child, we'd gather up our extra clothes and take them to the homeless shelter. If we had extra food, we'd take it to the neighbors. It was just something we did," Sears says.

"Volunteering is my life's purpose. It's what inspires me, what keeps me connected with my heart," she explains. After years of volunteering locally with her daughters' Girl Scout troops and with the Fresh Start Women's Resource Center, her oldest daughter, who was invited to go to Australia on a People to People International (PTPI) exchange program, dragged her to a meeting.

"I knew immediately that this was what I wanted to do, if not with my whole life, at least my spare time. I knew from personal experience that being introduced to different cultures changes a person and I knew I wanted to support People to People in any way I could. We live in a global economy and other countries might just as well be next door neighbors. My spirit was aching to be nurtured by that human connection," she says.

Sears now often uses her vacation to volunteer for People to People International, a nonprofit started in 1956 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. "The idea behind Eisenhower's agency was to develop friends.h.i.+ps with different nations. He figured that if people got to know each other, it would increase peace in the world," Sears says.

Last summer, she led a delegation of teens from six countries at a Future Business Leaders Summit in New York. During the ten-day summit, the teens, strangers before meeting in America, came up with a business plan to create and market a disaster relief kit-rations, candles, water, and other necessities that would sustain a family of four for two weeks. Setting aside any differences, they worked together to come up with the kit that could be used by FEMA and other disaster relief agencies around the world.

For Sears, volunteering with a delegation of international teens was a way to stay connected to other cultures and appreciate the world's diversity. She says, "Even though I've never been to Ireland, I feel I have a connection there now, because one of the boys on my team was from Belfast."

That deep connection is what drives her. "People get so busy and so stuck in their routines that they don't stop to help each other," Sears says. Yet volunteering counters that lost connection. "It fills my spirit up. It connects me back to my humanity.... Other people are always the best reflection of how much we have. I always get back so much more than I ever give."

INDIVIDUAL LIGHTHOUSES AROUND THE UNITED STATES.

serve as a lighthouse keeper.

WISCONSIN, MICHIGAN, RHODE ISLAND, AND WAs.h.i.+NGTON.

We cannot hold a torch to light another's path without brightening our own.

-Ben Sweetland, author, motivational speaker, and psychologist 9 Let there be lighthouses. And volunteers to keep them. Imagine living on a windswept island, listening to the waves crash against the sh.o.r.e as gulls wheel overhead. You're tending the lights, performing heroic rescues, and...okay, so that's not the exact job description, but lighthouses throughout the country use volunteers to keep the home fires burning. Here are just five: Devil's Island, Sand Island, and Michigan Island: The Apostle Islands National Lakesh.o.r.e, a scenic archipelago of 22 islands around the northern tip of Wisconsin's Bayfield Peninsula, uses volunteers to staff three of its six lighthouses: Devil's Island, Sand Island, and Michigan Island. As keeper, you'll greet the public, give tours (you'll get lots of exercise walking up and down the lighthouse stairs), mow lawns, serve as an emergency contact, and occasionally perform light maintenance work. Three weeks is the minimum stay at these lighthouses, and you'll be required to take all your food and supplies with you. Applications for these popular positions are accepted year-round, and selections for the upcoming season are made by March 31. There is no charge.

Apostle Islands National Lakesh.o.r.e, 415 Was.h.i.+ngton Avenue, Bayfield, WI 54814, 715-779-3397, www.nps.gov/apis/supportyourpark.

Grand Traverse Lighthouse: With 3,000 miles of coastline, Michigan has more lighthouses (130) than any other state except Alaska. From April through December, the Grand Traverse Lighthouse-located in Leelanau State Park-accepts volunteers who live in the former a.s.sistant's quarters, greet visitors, provide history lessons, and help out in the gift shop. Volunteers pay $440 for two weeks, $220 for one week.

Grand Traverse Lighthouse Museum, P.O. Box 43, 15500 North Lighthouse Point Road, Northport, MI 49670, 231-386-7195, www.grandtraverselighthouse.com.

The New Dungeness Light Station: Located at the tip of the nearly 5-mile-long Dungeness Spit in Sequim, Was.h.i.+ngton, this lighthouse has been in continuous operation guiding s.h.i.+ps through the Strait of Juan de Fuca since its completion in 1857. In 1994, all the duties of the lighthouse keeper were taken over by volunteer members of the New Dungeness Light Station a.s.sociation, who serve in one-week s.h.i.+fts. Volunteers stay in the three-bedroom Keeper's Quarters and give tours of the lighthouse (74 steps), mow the lawn, and perform general maintainance. Volunteer keepers pay $315 ($165 per child) to join and must attend orientation.

The New Dungeness Light Station, P.O. Box 1283, Sequim, WA 98382, 360-683-6638, www.newdungenesslighthouse.com.

Old Mission Point Lighthouse: This lighthouse, which was decommissioned in 1933, is located halfway between the North Pole and the Equator on the 45th parallel. You'll be expected to pitch in with light maintenance work, staff the gift shop, and act as an informal guide to field visitors' questions (not to worry, there's an orientation). The $600 per person fee covers a month's stay in private quarters that include a bedroom, a fully equipped kitchen, a living room, and office s.p.a.ce. In your free time, you can explore the 18-mile-long peninsula's beaches, vineyards, hiking and cycling trails, and sites like a furnished log cabin and an 1850s general store.

Old Mission Point Lighthouse, Old Mission, MI 49673, 231-386-7195.

BETCHA DIDN'T KNOW The first lighthouse in the United States was built in Boston in 1716.

The country's tallest lighthouse, at 191 feet, is at Cape Hatteras, North Carolina.

The Statue of Liberty was the first lighthouse to use electricity.

The United States Lighthouse Society has compiled extensive lighthouse data and publishes a magazine dedicated to lighthouses, The Keeper's Log.

Rose Island Lighthouse: Rose Island, an 18-acre island in Narragansett Bay, across from Newport, Rhode Island, has been used as a fort by the U.S. Infantry and as a torpedo station by the U.S. Navy. The island's Victorian-looking lighthouse, built in 1870, was refurbished in 1984 by the Rose Island Lighthouse Foundation and now uses volunteers to work as lighthouse keepers. You'll be responsible for tidying up the lighthouse, greeting visitors (who come over on the Jamestown Ferry in the summer), and collecting money from the landing fee boxes and the gift shop. After listening to the marine weather forecast each morning, you'll make your rounds, starting by raising the flag (you'll lower it at sunset) and checking on the wind-powered electric system and rain water collection system. A two-hour orientation precedes your weeklong (Sunday to Sunday) post. Prices run $700 to $2,300 depending on the time of year, with summer being more expensive than winter. Be sure to call ahead-the volunteering is by invitaiton only.

Rose Island Lighthouse Foundation, P.O. Box 1419, Newport, RI 02840, 401-847-4242, www.roseislandlighthouse.org.