More Vacationers Answer the Call to Help

FOR his winter vacation a year ago, Jude Fournier relaxed in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and his biggest activity of the day was moving between his hotel room and the beach. Recently, Mr. Fournier was getting ready for another trip, but this time his biggest concern wasn't whether to bring an extra swimsuit. Malaria pills, a first-aid kit and nonperishable snacks were on his packing list as he prepared for a day-and-a-half journey to Colombo, Sri Lanka, to assist with the tsunami clean-up.

''I want to do more than write a check,'' said Mr. Fournier, a 47-year-old high school teacher in Santa Fe, N.M., who started looking for volunteer opportunities to Southeast Asia two days after the tsunami hit on Dec. 26. In Sri Lanka, he joined other volunteers in putting up tents, passing out food and helping to rebuild a poor area in Moratuwa, a suburb of Colombo.

Volunteer vacations are not new, but the tsunami brought even more attention to this growing area of the travel industry that attracts tourists looking to forgo the usual in favor of a more intense cultural experience.

While the Indian Ocean disaster sparked more interest for trips to the affected areas, volunteer travel was already enjoying a boom, especially over the last year, as organizations expanded their lists of destinations and added shorter trips to cater more to the vacationer. Globe Aware, (214) 823-0083 and www.globeaware.org, a Dallas nonprofit group that started offering trips to Latin America and Asia in 2001, has mainly one- and some two-week excursions. In 2004, the number of trips arranged for travelers quadrupled from the year before.

Many organizations offering these trips are nonprofit groups and say that trip fees are tax deductible. But for the trips to qualify as tax deductible, the group must be an approved charitable organization in the United States and the trip can't include too much playtime.

Mark Luscombe, the principal federal tax analyst at CCH, a provider of tax-law information, said the trip had to be for charitable purposes and not have a significant vacation aspect. ''The air fare can also be deductible,'' he said, ''but probably not a first- or business-class ticket.''

But staying with a local family is often part of the appeal. Molly Last, 47, a teacher from San Francisco, spent three weeks last summer teaching English to Thai high school students and novice monks on a Global Service Corps trip. She lived with a family who worked at two high schools in Kanchanaburi, two hours northwest of Bangkok.

''I had a wonderful experience living with the family,'' she said. ''That was the key piece that bought me from the outside looking in to being a real insider.''

In addition to eating breakfast and dinner together, her family took her to the floating markets and to visit Cambodian ruins in the countryside. In fact, Ms. Last hit it off so well with her hosts that she is paying part of their travel expenses to visit the United States this year.

Unlike relief organizations like the American Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders that send trained volunteers or those who have specific medical backgrounds to their project sites, volunteer travel companies have few trips with any prerequisites.

''They should be physically fit and mentally prepared to walk into a disaster area,'' she said. ''It's not easy emotionally. Two weeks is an optimal amount of time. After that, people are going to be ready to go home.''

Often, travelers on volunteer trips try to combine tourism and service work into one trip. Some travelers augment such trips on their own. Ian and Jen Close booked 10 days on a safari in Kenya and Tanzania and a few days' relaxing on the beaches of Zanzibar, before spending two weeks in Arusha, Tanzania, teaching about AIDS.

The couple, from Vancouver, stayed with a family (''My day started at 2 a.m. when the rooster started going,'' Mr. Close said), and after a week of training, they taught a class of 44, with the help of an interpreter, about preventing H.I.V. transmission.

But even with training there were some unexpected questions thrown at the Closes in that one-room Tanzanian schoolhouse, especially when they talked about monogamy. ''The students would ask me: 'You have a wife; how do you know that she has been faithful?''' Mr. Close said.

Beyond their four hours a day of teaching, the Closes explored the local area, played cards with their family (who didn't speak English) and braved the local buses, called dala-dala.

''A ride in a safari truck is exciting,'' Mr. Close said. ''However, a ride in a dala-dala is truly an experience. It's basically a Mazda minivan stuffed with 16 people.''

The couple quickly became comfortable roaming around a town where at first they were wary of entering even the heavily protected bank to exchange money. Plus, they said, even in just a week of teaching, they felt as if they reached their students.

''If we only did the safari, we would have only seen half of Africa,'' Mrs. Close said. ''In that short period of time, I didn't feel like we would make those connections, but we did.''