While many people are keen to volunteer and travel, finding the time can be difficult. In many cases volunteering during a gap year is the best solution, but in recent times this idea has been subject to some criticism.

In today’s tough economic climate where university tuition fees are set to rise up to £9,000, many students are questioning the wisdom of halting their academic studies and playing out the gap year cliché.

However, Aisha Brown Colpani argues that taking a gap year to travel and volunteer is definitely worthwhile. Writing for Guardian.co.uk, she reflects on her gap year: “In my case, a year away from conventional education was exactly what I needed. It was an intense experience during which I studied, worked, travelled and had my first real taste of independence.”

Colpani spent six weeks volunteering in Peru, where she lived with a local family and helped out at a local nursery. Looking back on her time there, she feels she learnt a lot from the experience: “As volunteers that managed with the most basic of resources, we were given pretty much free rein to create activities for the kids; thrown in at the deep end, it was definitely one way of taking the initiative and embracing leadership….Despite the relatively short six weeks I spent volunteering, I like to think that it humbled and taught me in a way that a lecture couldn’t.”

Colpani is critical of the stereotypical view of gap year volunteers being shallow, public-school, ‘do-gooders’. While some of the volunteers she met were certainly in a more comfortable financial situation than most, they were genuine in their desire to help others: “They weren’t self-righteous and condescending about it – if anything, they were doing their thing without a second thought.”

Read the full article on Guardian.co.uk.

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