VOLUNTEER | TRAVEL | LIFE PURPOSE

Volunteering Gives Us Purpose As We Travel Full-Time

We like to feel as if we are a part of something bigger than ourselves

We have been back in Canada for over 6 months now. We didn’t plan to return this long, but it’s how things have played out. We aren’t sad about it. In fact, once back, we both realized quite quickly how tired we were of traveling and moving around. It’s nice to be somewhere we can stay a while and not have to worry about the ever-looming deadline on our visa.

For most of our time here we have been housesitting, which, I suppose is its own type of volunteering. We don’t get paid to housesit, and we don’t pay to stay in the house. It is a free exchange. We have housesat in quite a few countries around the world now, and we always enjoy it as there are no demands on our time other than to take care of the animals and the house.

But it’s meaningful volunteering where we really shine. We enjoy helping others and we know that our hard work makes a difference in their lives.

Volunteering In Canada

Currently, we are staying on a 6000-acre multi-generational farm in Eastern Alberta, Canada, where we have been for about a month.

We initially came for 3–4 days. We were given our own house to stay in on the property and full access to the food in the garden plus a freezer full of their home-grown beef. At first, they just had a small list of chores for us to complete, but after just a couple of days, we told our friend (for the context of how this came to be, read this article) that we were happy to stay longer if they had more for us to do.

It took her a few days to wrap her head around this. We are in Canada, after all. People don’t just volunteer to do things. Most people want to get paid for their efforts. But this is how we have traveled for the past 6 years, and we don’t see any need to change a good thing.

Whether we are painting murals, working on farms and orchards, teaching permaculture, or building gardens, we do so solely in exchange for accommodation and sometimes food.

Of course, the biggest benefit of this is that it makes life affordable. Without the large cost of housing and food, we don’t really need much to survive. Would you believe me if I told you that while living in Canada, for the past month we have spent just $240? I know, it is shocking. We never even considered that this was a lifestyle that we could pull off in expensive Canada, of all places.

Our friend struggled mentally with this exchange for a few days, but she came to understand that usually when people are paid to work, most of their money goes back into the basic needs of survival anyway. When those are met, there really is no NEED to make extra money, but of course, we enjoy life more when we have more.

The farm even has its own tanks of gas where we are free to fill up our borrowed vehicle!

Now, we don’t volunteer for 8 hours per day. We usually only put in 2–3 hours, about 4–5 times per week. So it isn’t exactly hard work. Plus, we are usually doing work that we enjoy. We have done some painting on the grain bins, have fixed a couple of doors that weren’t opening properly, have picked a bazillion apples and have cleared a lot of brush and stuff in the garden as it is put to bed for the winter. We both love being outside and for the most part, farm work is outside.

We also love the physical fitness that is a result of this sort of work. After fattening up in Canmore this summer, we are happy to have a way to get back in shape.

The rest of our time is spent working on our own online projects plus doing hobbies and other things that we enjoy. We have rested and recuperated a lot, have made so much delicious food, and have accomplished many online projects that we haven’t had time for. We truly could not be more grateful for this experience to come our way and know that it has been exactly what we needed to recover from our traveling life.

We are set to move on in a few days and we are sad to leave this place. But we have been told numerous times now that if we want to come back, the house is here waiting for us. It’s nice to know that we have options of places to stay that allow us the time and space to relax and enjoy ourselves. It also helps that we really love the farm and enjoy the work that we are doing on it.

We have also come to realize that we are part of something much larger than ourselves here. This farm is a seed farm. They grow seeds for other farmers to plant, which in turn feeds our country. Though our tasks are seemingly not a part of the larger picture, the things we have been doing have certainly helped the farm operations and will make things run smoother moving forward.

Knowing that our skills are being used, in a very small part, to feed Canadians, is pretty damn cool if you ask me.

As we were picking apples the other day, (did I mention that they have 14 varieties of apples?), it occurred to me that picking apples has been a large part of our volunteer life. In Bulgaria, we cleared an orchard for a family plus pruned their overgrown trees that were being smothered by clematis vines. But we also volunteered to pick apples in the town we lived in before we set out on this full-time traveling journey.

There, I was a volunteer bookkeeper for the Skookum Food Provisioners Co-op and took on the role of organizer for our annual cider press event, our largest fundraiser of the year. Numerous people there have apple trees and many can’t keep up with them. So, they would donate their apples to our event and we would sell the cider to raise money for the co-op. Of course, somebody had to pick those apples. Chris and I were amongst a handful of people that would volunteer to do that and we would stockpile them in our basement for a while before the event.

Clearing the trees was helpful for the owners, primarily because they were a big bear attractant. I wrote about this in my recent Canada Is Wild article. But knowing that they were also going to a good cause came with a very rewarding feeling.

The food co-op gives free classes on preserving food, permaculture techniques, and making cheese, amongst other self-sustainable practices. Plus we hosted a large seed exchange where people could harvest their own seeds from their gardens, package them, and then trade them with other gardeners. The organization didn’t get much credit on the big stage, but the work they do is important for that remote region of the world that is accessible only by ferry.

We really enjoyed our time spent with them, and know that, at the very least, we contributed to the betterment of that region's sustainability goals.

Learning new things

Volunteering in different places truly allows us to get down and dirty in other cultures. We learn firsthand how the people we volunteer for are living on our planet, which is our ultimate goal in this traveling life. We aren’t consumed with seeing all the sights, but we both have an insatiable appetite to learn about how others go about their daily lives.

This has led us to learn so many different things about different cultures, food and lifestyles.

While in Uganda, we helped our friend harvest fresh coffee beans from his plantation. We then continued on with them and learned the whole process of how they become the coffee that we drink today.

In Bulgaria, we learned so much about making traditional Bulgarian food as our hostess was an incredible cook. Below is a photo of Lutenitsa being cooked on the fire behind their home. I wrote an article about this delicious food, I wonder if Krasi Shapkarova has read it?

Another cool experience was volunteering to help build an earthbag construction home in Nicaragua. Natural building is certainly something that we are both interested in, so it was great to get a front-row experience to learn just how it is done. Plus, we lived in a very rural community in Nicaragua and got to see first-hand how the people were living in the area.

I even designed the windows and our hostess had her welders make them to my specifications.

We both have insatiable appetites for information and learning new things about the regions that we are in. Volunteering certainly brings us closer to this knowledge.

HelpX

Similar to the more popular volunteer platform, Workaway, we learned about HelpX last year while we were in Istanbul, Turkey. It is an online platform where hosts can list their properties as a place for people to come and volunteer for various reasons, with the promise of accommodation and usually food, in exchange.

What is so great about this platform is that it costs just $25 for a 2-year membership, and it gives us thousands of options of places to stay for free, around the world. Of course, we were excited about the possibilities and got started straight away. This is how we found our volunteer gig in Bulgaria.

But upon returning to Canada, we didn’t even consider that this could be an option for us. One day it dawned on me though, and I decided to take a look at the website to see what opportunities were available. I was amazed to see listings across the whole country! We just had to pick where we wanted to go.

On the platform, we can list our travel plans, and this tells others that we will be coming to their area. At one point we considered heading out to Nova Scotia in the fall, so I updated our profile. Since then, we have had numerous offers in Nova Scotia, but have also had offers in British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec.

So it seems, at this point, that Canada is our oyster:)

What’s next?

Well, despite stating NUMEROUS times that we have no interest in going through another brutally cold Canadian winter, it seems that it may just be the case this year. We are in a bit of a limbo position as we save money to move on, plus, as stated earlier, we are happy to be in a place that allows us to stay a while.

We really want to make sure that we are fully rested and rejuvenated before we head back out into the unknown.

In the meantime, we will continue our volunteer work which allows us to live in the same manner as we did while out in the world. We certainly had no idea that this was a possibility in our own country!

As we roam around our planet, it’s sometimes easy to wonder what the heck we are doing and what good we are to society, but by putting our skills to use for others we are rewarded beyond measure. We both feel that our skills are our gifts to share with the world and we take great pride in helping others to achieve things in their lives that they are not able to manage themselves.

Meanwhile, we continue our quest for knowledge and experiences.

Learning new things about the people and the places we visit is the reward for our hard work. Through this, we continuously gain a broader perspective of our world and how it functions and we will never tire of the diversity that is out there just waiting for us to discover it.

Volunteering is our gateway to this and it helps us to feel like we are part of something much larger than just our two individual lives.

If you like my writing and want to read more, follow me and sign up here to get my articles by email. We would also be happy if you considered leaving me a tip by using the link to Patreon or Ko-Fi below:)

We have been nomadic since 2017! Join our journey by hitting these links:

Website | Instagram | Facebook | LinkedIn| Patreon| YouTube | Medium | Twitter | Ko-Fi | Unsplash