Spending a month working in a Tanzanian hospital seems like an unlikely summer vacation for most students.
College junior Rebecca Davis begs to differ.
A nearly 20-hour trek to Tanzania, via Amsterdam, led Davis to a tiny village outside the city of Arusha, where she spent a month working in a local hospital.
The trip was full of experiences not advertised in your average brochure.
She spent afternoons at a bar with locals, nursed a friend with malaria back to health and greeted miles of sunflowers and cornfields every morning.
Davis is among the growing number of American college students traveling halfway around the world just to volunteer.
So-called "volunteer vacations" range from strictly community service to a combination of volunteering and tourism. Students travel long hours, pay enormous fees and brave life-threatening diseases - all in the name of volunteer work.
Why go so far for such a short time? For-profit companies are counting on students' desires to change the world, even if it is just for a week.
And the price for self-fulfillment is not cheap.
The cost of such programs - not including airfare - range from $1,000 to over $3,000.
Davis said the cost seemed high, since living expenses in her region were minimal. But going on a trip with Cross-Cultural Solutions - which coordinates these types of programs - provided her with safety provisions and support that she said made the expense worthwhile.
While experts who work year-round in these regions worry that such projects encourage superficial interest in areas with complex issues, returning students say the programs are a necessary first step to get young people involved.
No comprehensive numbers exist to count the total number of students going on these trips. Penn Director of Study Abroad Geoffrey Gee said Penn does not usually track the number of students traveling over the summer through non-University programs.
But even without official numbers, staff at companies that facilitate these trips say they have noticed an increase in the number of students signing up.
Kam Santos, spokeswoman for Cross-Cultural Solutions, said almost half of their estimated 3,300 participants in 2006 were between the ages of 18 and 24.
She said the purpose of such programs is to help students experience life in the developing world first-hand. It offers an alternative, Santos said, to "blindly donating" to these areas.
Concern exists among critics - and even supporters - of these programs, however, that such short trips can hurt development work in regions with deep-seeded political, economic or social problems.
Andrew Marx, a spokesman for Partners in Health - a health-focused development organization - said his organization discourages short-term volunteering.
"The reality is that it takes a long time for somebody who has grown up in this country to have enough of an understanding for the lives of the people in developing countries to really contribute," Marx said.
College sophomore Alex Hirsch, who spent three months in Lesotho in southern Africa through Baylor College of Medicine, said many development workers he met worried that short-term volunteers "wanted to do things for themselves, not for the people who were actually there."
Roy McFarland, spokesman for Volunteer Adventures, said that his organization recognizes the problems with short term programs, but that the benefits of putting students in the field are too great to ignore.
"I'm not going to deny these people the ability to volunteer," McFarland said.
And students like Davis are grateful for McFarland's attitude.
After only a few months back in the United States, she is already planning her next trip back.
