Benefits of Teen International Community Service – VISIONS.com
When you are in high school, you usually have more say about how you spend your summers. Some of your classmates will work or intern, others will travel with their family and friends, and a few will take classes. You can enjoy some benefits of all of those experiences when you choose to volunteer for a teen international community service program. Whether you are fourteen and just beginning to shape your future or eighteen and already headed towards college, volunteering abroad is a life changing choice that will expand your perspective of yourself and the world.
As with any job, volunteering involves hard work and dedication. They both also teach new skills and develop your already existing strengths. Study abroad programs for teens, however, allow you not only to become part of an entirely new community but also to improve your new home-away-from-home by giving of yourself. The most beneficial programs are multi-layered and will involve various individual projects that are part of a larger vision. For example, in addition to construction projects, like building a school from the ground up, you would also tutor the children who will be attending that school. Both these efforts improve the educational opportunities in your host community, while also teaching you things that access different aspects of yourself, which makes you a more well-rounded person. A common goal of jobs and internships is to develop your future career. Volunteering also guides you down your professional path, but has the additional benefit of travel and adventure.
Your friends who are spending their summer vacation travelling will undoubtedly have an amazing time exploring new places, meeting new people, and trying new things. Of course, you will do all of that and more when you are part of a teen international community service effort. In fact, you will become an integral part of your host community, as you explore and discover all it has to offer over a more extended period of time. In a well-balanced program, you will be investing energy into bettering your surroundings about 55-60% of the time and the rest of the time will include opportunities for leisure and exploration. Also, we all know that locals experience their cities and neighborhoods differently than tourists. While you and a vacationing friend will both be exposed to a different culture and location, you will have a more complex understanding of the people you have met and the place you have visited.
While learning is always immensely valuable, not all education happens in a formal classroom. In addition to all the new things your study abroad volunteer program has exposed you to, it is highly likely that you will return home with some proficiency in a foreign language. By volunteering internationally, chances are many of the people you encounter will not speak English very well, if at all. As you are immersed in your new community, you are bound to pick up the local language, which is often Spanish or French. You may even want to factor that in when you select a geographical area for your volunteer work. Whether you want to improve your fluency or acquire an altogether unfamiliar foreign language, you will become somewhat bilingual or multilingual by the end of your program.
As you decide what to do this summer, strongly consider teen international community service programs. It affords you the opportunity to experience some of the best parts of many individual endeavors. True, you will not have extra money in your pocket, enjoy the same amount of relaxation, or an additional grade on your transcript, but by volunteering abroad you will have made the world a better place, and there really is not anything that is more wonderful than that.
John Brown is a freelance writer in Los Angeles who cherishes the time he has spent volunteering and looks forward to his future community service experiences. You may want to begin exploring volunteering abroad programs for teens by visiting VisionsServiceAdventures.com.
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