Charity Travel (CT) is an independent large adventurous journey around the world, combining exciting traveling with supporting small-scale charity projects, thereby inspiring other (young) travelers to follow the example. Charity Travel wants to show that nowadays it is possible to bypass large bureaucracies and individually work with small charities that really need help. The emphasis lies on inspiring as many travelers as possible by showing them charity can be exciting, cool, and effective at the same time.
The travel project will take place between october 2009 and october 2010. Starting off in Central Asia, from Turkey down to Egypt, I’ll reach Africa by the end of november. I’ll spend three months in Africa, living near Nairobi and near Maputo. Late february I’ll fly to India, where I’ll stay one month. From there the journey continues to Southeast Asia and Oceania, arriving in Australia in early summer. After a short break in New Zealand I’ll fy to Bolivia and Haïti to volunteer again and finish up around Christmas.
The exact itinerary is available on the weblog http://charitytravel.blogspot.com
I have acquired contacts to a number of reliable charities in countries around the world by making smart use of the internet, especially the website couchsurfing.org. The possibility to establish direct contacts to deservable trustworthy charities this quick was unthinkable a decade ago. This empowers me to carry out my plan without donating money to first-world paychecks instead of real necessities for the poor.
Charity Travel will visit about twenty small charities in different countries and continents, and offer them a donation between 100 and 1000 USD each. We will decide together how to use that money. I’ll study each particular charity and document it. During my stay I’ll of course help as much as possible with constructing work, cooking, farming, and teaching.
This way, I hope to inspire other young travelers and induce an appetite to get involved in charity themselves. Charity Travel will show how adventurous traveling can be when it is combined with helping the poor and destitute. I hope that one day other travelers will set out on journeys even longer than my own, combining even more urgent humanitarian and ecological projects with even more exciting adventures.
A crucial aspect of the project is media attention, since the success of Charity Travel eventually depends on its fame. The more newspapers and magazines write about the project, the more travelers will have a look at it and take it into consideration. Together with them, I think Charity Travel can really make a difference.