8/10/08

Purpose-driven teens

Youth global travel is booming: Kids just want to have a mission, along with a little fun and resume-polishing.

When Bethesda, Md., high school student Jenna Kusek first saw where she'd be living for three weeks in Tanzania, she thought, "You've got to be kidding."

This hole in the ground is the toilet? A trickle of cold water from an elevated hose is the shower?

But Kusek soon gained a new perspective. The white stucco house she shared with other teenage volunteers last summer was a mansion by local standards, and better than the concrete-block house they would spend their days building for a local teacher. A cold shower, she realized, was a luxury unavailable to the village kids.

A year after the trip, tears come to her eyes when she talks about how guilty she began feeling about having access to any kind of shower.

"Compared to how people lived in the village, our housing was too good to be true," says Kusek, 18, who is about to start college. "I knew before I went to Africa that I was blessed, but I had no idea how lucky I was. I can't believe now the things we once took for granted."

Kusek's experience is being repeated by an ever-growing number of American teens traveling all over the world, led by dozens of companies feeding an appetite not only for more-exotic travel, but also for travel with a purpose.

Time was, a bus through Europe was the ultimate trip for a lucky high school student of a certain class. Jeffrey Shumlin, codirector of Vermont-based Putney Student Travel, remembers that for the first 20 years after his family founded the business, it was called European Travel Camp. No more.

"Today, traveling to Europe does not represent as large a cultural leap as it once did," Shumlin says. "Kids today seek greater challenges farther off the beaten track."

Besides, American teens from prosperous families have been taught not to waste time.

"They have extremely demanding schedules; they are pressured by schools and parents to compose a well-rounded image for applying for college," Shumlin says. "They are in a pressure cooker at a very young age, and, as a result, when they think about what to do for the summer, they want something meaningful and worthwhile."

For years, there has been a niche market for teen trips to exotic places with an emphasis on cultural immersion and community service, but now the market is exploding. Dozens of travel companies, with such names as Where There Be Dragons and Global Routes, arrange the trips, as do church and civic groups. The latest player: National Geographic. This summer, the nonprofit organization's new Student Expeditions arm teamed up teens with National Geographic Society archaeologists, photographers, scientists and writers to explore such things as the Inca empire and the treasures of India, while also arranging for them to spend time working with impoverished children or participating in projects such as clearing forest trails.

Lynn Cutler of National Geographic said the organization commissioned a study and found that teens who could afford travel wanted purpose and personal development.

The market is expected to grow: This is the largest generation of young people in history, and 1 million children worldwide will turn 12 every year for the next decade. Even now, students make up 24 percent of all international travelers. They are traveling at earlier ages, going on more-expensive trips, and going to destinations farther from home than any previous generation, according to the Student & Youth Travel Association.

Companies serving this emerging market produce trips with various degrees of work and play. One of Kusek's four weeks in Tanzania was spent on such activities as photographing exotic animals on safari in Ngorongoro Crater and hiking around Mount Kilimanjaro. The other three weeks of the Putney-sponsored trip, she lived and worked in the village of Miangarini, mixing mortar and stacking heavy concrete blocks. She valued both experiences equally.

"I never took one day for granted," Kusek says. "Every moment in Tanzania was the most amazing moment of my life."

How much a teen gets out of it depends, of course, on the teen. Several of those on Kusek's trip were forced by their parents to go, Kusek says. "It was a dream come true for me, and it should have been for every single one of them." Several boys never did any work, but Kusek says she "just looked past that, figuring I'm going to build something that's really needed, and I'm going to feel good about it."

Some of the slackers tried to track down liquor, Kusek says, but found it impossible. Not only were the students warned that they'd be sent home if caught drinking, but villagers were asked to cooperate by refusing to sell whatever homemade brews were on hand.

Like Kusek, many students are serious about their commitments.

For Lucy Britt of Blacksburg, Va., her trip to Rwanda last month reflects her long-term concerns about genocide. Two years ago, Britt and several friends produced a movie about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. She has been demonstrating against genocide in Darfur and is working to form a chapter of the Anti-Genocide Coalition at her high school.

Her 31/2-week visit to Rwanda included three days in the capital of Kigali, talking with officials and genocide survivors, and nine days in the small village of Nyamata, helping children with disabilities. She and her Putney group also worked on a foundation for a home for the children. There was only one day of normal tourism - a journey to Volcanoes National Park to see the golden monkeys - plus her 16th birtday.

Britt would not have considered a trip that was merely fun. And there are enough teens like her that even established exotic travel companies have had to adapt their programs. ActionQuest, for example, has been taking teens on water-based adventure trips since 1986. A few years ago, the tour organizer added a program that focuses on community service, such as working with disabled orphans in China, in national parks in the Galapagos, or with slum kids in Thailand.

Mike Meighan, one of the company's directors, points to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as a stimulus for the trend toward trips that have both a purpose and a destination. "It shook everyone's sense of the state of the world," he says.

Putney Student Travel's Shumlin also sees the impact of those attacks. At first, parents simply worried that major European cities could be targets, and wanted something rural and remote for their children, he says. That helped develop an appetite for off-the-beaten-track journeys.

The trend grew with the developing sense that the world needed to be better understood and needed saving, Shumlin says.

Then there's students' desire to stand out, as competition to get into the most selective colleges spirals ever upward.

"We all recognize that the phenomenon is on the increase," acting Harvard admissions director Marlyn McGrath says, referring to application essays that focus on such trips. "In the past several years, we began to observe it's relatively common."

Shawn Abbott of the Stanford University admissions office agrees that he has seen a "proliferation" of these types of programs and a "pattern of students from affluent backgrounds doing service in exotic locales." Stanford, he says, "tends to be sensitive that for many students, being able to study or work in a foreign country is not part of their reality." Still, he worries that such opportunities could "raise the bar of competition."

Both McGrath and Abbott emphasize that although the trips can supply grist for a good essay, they're not tickets into the country's top universities. "An applicant with a summer job in retail can write an essay just as compelling as the kid doing service in Senegal," Abbott says.

Some programs, including Putney and National Geographic, have scholarship funds for children from low-income families. Even so, Edward Christophersen, a clinical psychologist at Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Mo., worries that the trend is so pronounced it may create pressure on middle-class families "who have to knock themselves out to send their kids on such a trip."

Then again, providing such a trip beats giving a teen an expensive car or throwing a lavish graduation party, Christophersen adds. If it opens a child's vision and increases his or her sense of compassion, the money has been well spent, he says. "Otherwise, it's just an expensive trip."

Travel to distant lands for an extended period is expensive, and trips that include community service often include the added expense of project materials. Jenna Kusek's trip to Tanzania, for example, cost nearly $8,000, and money was an obstacle. In fact, her parents turned her down the first time.

Her mother, Jody, says the money the teens spent traveling would have gone further if donated directly to the village. But the money was well spent "helping to create a new person whose life now is more about awareness of others," Jody Kusek says. "She has been forever changed."

Shumlin says his goal is "to get young people at a vulnerable time and give them a perspective on the world and their own country and how they live."

His personal gratification sometimes comes in surprising places. For example, in a cafe in Rwanda, he began chatting with a young American expat, Elizabeth Davis. She was excited to learn that he was co-owner of Putney: In 2001, as a high school junior, she had taken a Putney trip to Costa Rica, her first trip abroad. During the trip, she had helped build a water tower, volunteered at a local school, and decided to spend her life working in the developing world.

She subsequently spent four years at Vanderbilt University and, after graduating in 2006, headed to Rwanda. She's now with a grassroots organization that educates orphans and street kids and works with student leaders to foster healing of the psychological scars of the genocide there.

"Like most of my friends, I grew up in the comfortable American bubble and really had no idea what life was like for people in the developing world," Davis says. "That high school trip played a huge role in making me the person I am today."

She may one day run into Jenna Kusek, who intends to return to Africa after she graduates college. Before her trip, she had ruled out the Peace Corps, thinking the organization's two-year tours of duty were too long. Now, the Peace Corps is her goal, and Africa is where she wants to volunteer.

"I'm not saying I might go back," Kusek says. "I'm saying I will."


Pointers for Parents

Thinking of sending your teenager on a community service trip? Two things to keep in mind: If your kids don't want to go, don't force them, since a positive attitude is essential. Second, when a trip organizer requires your child to fill out an application or submit an essay, don't write it for him or her. The application is intended to help the provider assess a teen's readiness for a trip; let them do their jobs.

Here are a few questions to ask before choosing a provider:

How long has the company or nonprofit group been in business under the current ownership?

Will the travel provider supply information allowing you to contact previous travelers?

What is the ratio of teens to on-site employees, and what is the minimum age, training and experience of employees? Look for providers that hire college graduates, as opposed to college students only a year or so older than the teens they're supervising, advises Jeffrey Shumlin of Putney Student Travel.

What does the company do to prevent access to illegal substances, and what is its policy regarding teens caught using alcohol or drugs?

What plans are in place to react to health problems and other emergencies?

How many hours are spent in community service? Sometimes community service is the focus; other times, it's a brief sidelight.

Has the community where the service is being performed been involved in choosing a project and making the plans? Jason Sarouhan of Global Routes says that's the only way to be sure something useful is being built.

Have company employees visited the work site and planned the activities, or has that role been subcontracted? Shumlin says the best companies closely interact with the community their teen clients will serve.






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Jean-Louis Kayitenkore
Procurement Consultant
Gsm: +250-08470205
Home: +250-55104140
P.O. Box 3867
Kigali-Rwanda
East Africa
Blog: http://www.cepgl.blogspot.com
Skype ID : Kayisa66

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