There’s a growing trend among travelers that introduces charity work into vacation time. Instead of just backpacking through a country, travelers are able to immerse themselves into different cultures by volunteering in different kinds of organizations on their own dime. These organizations often involve children in orphanages or schools, but they can also range from provincial farms to elephant camps around the world.

Volunteering in remote places around the world is mutually beneficial for these organizations and their volunteers. On one hand, the organizations are able to receive much needed extra pairs of hands for free while volunteers actually get to see where their donations go, and get a unique view of a foreign city or countryside in the process.

First-timers will often enlist the help of an organization like Friends of Asia or Volunteer in Africa (volunteerinafrica.org) in order to ensure their safety and to learn more about what they’re getting into before taking the plunge. Others will go directly to the hospitals, refugee camps, fishing villages and other places that they want to volunteer for, in order to cut out the middle man, and to find more unique experiences. In this case, however, it’s always best to contact and coordinate with the community or organization in advance.

Whatever the case, people needed to understand that volunteers did not get special treatment, says Catherine Riley-Bryan, a nurse and teacher, who runs a school in Thailand. People need to immerse themselves in the day-to-day lives of the people that they’ll be staying with.

Volunteers can’t expect to do good work on their terms alone. Instead, they may need to go to bed at 6pm and wake up at 5am every day, become vegetarians for the duration of their stay, and work for seven days a week. But in the end, the sacrifices are bound to be rewarding.

View a previously written post by Mouli Cohen about Philanthropy.