Rustic Pathways

One piece of advice I'd love to give someone is to go in with an open mind. Know that it will not be like anything you've ever experienced before but in a good way. You will learn a lot about yourself, your surroundings, and your community. It taught me not just the value of service, but also the value of quality time and quality people.

Ever since the program, I actively reflect and still keep in touch with people I met on the program because it gave me such a strong comradery between the others in the program.

An average day looks like waking up, eating breakfast with everyone and talking about the agenda for the rest of the day. This may include eating breakfast, and then discussing what happened yesterday, what you learned yesterday, and then we will discuss what service project we will be doing today and what else to look forward to.

My biggest fear was probably the language barrier.

I did not know any Thai and I still don't know a lot, but rest assured: the program leaders made sure we had a pocket of useful phrases kept on our body at all times and even helped us translate when needed. It ended up not being a big deal because most of the time they would communicate for us and we can focus on providing service and enjoying ourselves.

I think my favorite memory would be the day of arrival.

My group just spent over 16 hours flying, layovers and flying again nonstop. When we finally arrived at the base house, it was already late into the evening in Thailand and not only that, we were pretty jetlagged. It was a long and exhausting journey, but nothing will compare to the joy of arriving there, suddenly curing all fatigue and exhaustion due to the adrenaline of pure excitement for what was to come.

That night, I still remember getting settled into my room and bed, lying down, and just looking outside the window. I saw the moon amongst the skies, and the stars just seemed to glisten with grace. It was a beautiful night and I remember looking outside and thinking about how exciting a journey this next week was going to be.

I have a personal affinity for our Panda Conservation project in China because I've spent so much time developing educational content for the program.

Students are just able to learn how researchers manage captive species as well as how much work goes into the field of conservation, and we work at a center that has 20% of all pandas in captivity in the world. It's just a very unique opportunity to work on a project that you wouldn't be able to do on your own in personal travels later in life.

I think the thing that makes Rustic Pathways stand out is our long-term commitment to sustainable growth in the countries and communities that we work in.

We have full-time staff year-round in the countries where we operate that allow us to more easily control our safety policies as an organization, but also be a part of year-long planning with the communities where we work setting up volunteer projects and continuing to make sure that former projects keep their momentum after our students leave their program.

I think one of the biggest factors to being in a successful organization is being able to adapt and make changes when necessary.

Being flexible also allows us to work with a wide variety of students from a wide variety of backgrounds so that our trips on the ground fulfill the goals of individuals that may have different passions. Adaptability also allows us to innovate and create new programs that fulfill program wishes for our future students with new and exciting content!