You can go travelling just for spending your money and having fun. Or, you can also do it with a little bit more of meaningful reason such as giving back to the local community. Travel experience is subjective. Every individual may have different experience even when visiting the same place. You can travel with a mission and enhance your experience in return. And you can do it with the skills you have.
Enhancing your travel experience with your skills
It is possible to contribute what you have with your skills to the community you visit during your trip. Sometimes, the opportunities just come organically when you meet new people, make conversation, and finally find out what unmet needs are there in the community. So here are some ideas in which you can use your skills to have enhance your travel experience in a meaningful way:
Milk your expertise
You might think your skills are not something worth mentioning. However, your skills might be everything for the people you meet during your trip. For example you are good at planting and gardening. You can teach the local or villagers how to do gardening your way and see if they are interested to learn. Or, you might be good at massage therapy and you can give massage the people and help them relieve those tension in their body. Those kind of contribution can enhance your interaction with them, allowing you to learn something more.
Target particular group
Sometimes it is not about your skill being useless but it can about wrong audience to target for. Hence, you may brainstorm different target groups to see who will benefit from your volunteering. You may consider group of ages, animals, professional, educational, and economic group, gender, ethnic communities, etc. You can share your expertise at teaching math, English, dance, music, Yoga, and even art.
Storytelling
You might think your life is pretty boring but it might be pretty amazing to hear for other people who don’t know about your culture and where you live. Therefore, you can use your skill at storytelling to share some stories of about yourself or the people close to you in your life. You don’t have to speak local language. Ask a person to translate what you are saying. Maybe it can be an opportunity for them to get interested in learning English.
Help protect the environment
You ma not have special skills to contribute to the locals in a fancy way but you can help the locals to protect the environment. For example, you can help the locals with garbage clean-up campaigns, or you can help volunteer in a local animal shelter.
Share your experiences
Share the stories with the people at home. You may give a presentation about what you did during your trip or write an article about it on local newspaper to raise awareness of certain issues. It is how you can harness your creativity and expertise to make difference to those around you while enhancing your travel experience.
