Service Learning Mission Trips Explained
Adventures in Service — Travel with a purpose!
More and more young Americans these days are discovering the joy and personal satisfaction that attaches to helping others by participating on Passports Service Learning tours overseas. Community service requirements are now commonplace in American high schools while many students are volunteering in local communities on their own, with or without the motivation provided by any academic credits that might be attached to Service Learning and Youth Mission Trips.
Increasingly, international travel programs are responding to this new phenomenon by combining the best of two worlds-educational, culturally stimulating overseas travel matched with Service Learning and Youth Mission projects that provide tangible benefit to communities struggling to survive and thrive amid challenges unknown in more developed lands.
In response to this wave of enthusiasm for Service Learning programs that can actually make a difference in peoples' lives, Passports is pleased to introduce Passports Adventures in Service , educational Service Learning programs that leave the countries and people visited measurably better off for having hosted a group of our young Service Learning volunteers.
No one can dispute the benefits experienced by a young high school student seeing Paris for the first time from the top of the Eiffel Tower. But this is not Service Learning. This experience is essentially a one-way street with most of the benefits accruing to the visitor. Now, take that same young student, and place him or her on a Passports Service Learning tour in a developing country where the benefits of being exposed to a new culturally rich environment rival, if not exceed, that of experiencing Paris. And in the relatively short span of a week to ten days, tangible real good is accomplished on a Passports Service Learning Tour by the young visitor in quantifiable ways. Service Learning — that's the type of travel experience that truly changes he lives of both visitors and hosts alike.
On our Service Learning tours, there are many ways Passports Adventures in Service volunteers may help. Imagine... teaching basic English in impoverished schools in Costa Rica ... helping to build simple Lorena stoves (which greatly reduce fuel consumption and improve the health and life expectancy of the home's inhabitants by reducing inhaled smoke) in Peru ... building recycling stations along with waste receptacles in China... enhancing capacity at rehabilitation shelters and elderly care units in Thailand... teaching English pronunciation and colloquialisms in Martinique... refurbishing buildings for use as schools in Vietnam... building wheelchairs for landmine victims in Cambodia... and working on preservation efforts to protect the ancient ruins of Chalcatzingo, Mexico from deterioration. Imagine! With Passports Service Learning Programs, the possibilities are virtually limitless, while the potential benefit that participants experience could, as the ads say, be priceless!
