If you love to travel and you have a soft spot in your heart for helping people, check out Lakewood-based Globe Aware. You can travel, live among the people, leave them with better living, and have fun.

Globe Aware will guarantee that you come back from vacation with a full photo album and sense of personal fulfillment, as well.

Globe Aware is a nonprofit charity that sponsors about 80 volunteer vacations trips a year to Nepal, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Costa Rica, Honduras, Peru, Brazil, and Cuba.
Kimberly Haley Coleman, Lakewood resident and founder of Globe Aware, wanted to organize meaningful programs that could bring people together, in interesting and culturally different environments, which would be fun and educational. Globe Aware aims to make this happen. Their motto is: Help people. Have fun.

“A group of like-minded individuals who had done quite a bit of international travel and service vacations came together to fill the void that exist on volunteering in foreign countries because not many people can take the 27 months out of their lives to live in foreign countries, like one does for the Peace Corps,” she said.

Launched in 2001, Mrs. Haley-Coleman said the organization is based on such humanitarian organizations as Habitat for Humanity and Earthwatch. It focuses on projects that require basic manual labor that whole families can participate in. “After 9/11, many people became interested in getting to know the rest of the world and helping out,” she said.

Brenna Fitzgerald has gone to Costa Rica twice with Globe Aware.“It was one of the most fulfilling experiences I have ever had. I think I’m now ready to try out some of the more exotic locales,” she said.

Mrs. Haley-Coleman’s brother, Gregory, also of Lakewood, summed up his experience:
“ I love the premise of having fun while you are helping people. It’s really a unique and tremendous experience to put you deep into the Costa Rican rainforest and meet people who live totally different lives, and then help them accomplish goals, which help them which help the whole community.”

Volunteers are abroad for a week where they live with the locals while working one community-based projects. “We go into these areas and ask them what they need. If it is safe, interesting, and meaningful, we can do it,” Mrs. Haley-Coleman added. There are about 100 projects going on and more than 100 volunteers working in every aspect of the organization – from managing its website to leading volunteers on trips.

In rural Honduras villages, one bite from a chagas bug, which lives in mud roofs of homes, is deadly. After infestation, they die slowly for years from heart atrophy.
Globe Aware learned of this problem and questioned locals from more developed towns about how they eradicate the problem. The volunteers learned that baking the mud into tiles got rid of the bug. Now Globe Aware volunteers are working on a project in Honduras teaching this skill to villagers plagued by chagas.

In Peru, volunteers worked with more than 60 deaf and mute children at an orphanage in the capital, Cuzco. The children were taught job skills that they could use for their future, including how to assemble wheel chairs from recycled parts of plastic lawn chairs and old bicycle wheels. These wheel chairs were given to the orphans with neurological problems.

Creating sustainability projects such as these is a major consideration for Globe Aware when it is deciding how to help.

Globe Aware’s efforts have been highlighted by major television and radio networks such as NBC’s Today Show, CNN, and NPR, as well as national newspapers and magazines, including Newsweek and Business Week.

Later this year, Concrete Pictures will begin airing the first of nine hour-long episodes for a documentary reality series on Globe Aware’s trip to Cuzco, Peru, and where they worked with the orphans. The series will air in High Definition.