I like words. I like the different ways they can convey information, how they can allude, obscure, tempt, and entertain. I also like the way they can tell you a lot about a person, about the way they choose specific words to say something. How they choose to convey, entertain, and insinuate. In situations where someone’s written text is all you have to go on, understanding the subtlety of words can be a handy skill to pick up.

Take volunteering as a form of travel, for example. The concept is simple: you become a member of a volunteering website, which gives you access to a worldwide directory of project listings. These listings can be quite diverse and cover anything from farming work and construction to language exchanges and babysitting.You apply for listings you like and travel to another place where you help a stranger build their dreams and become part of their daily lives. In return, you get a bed and daily meals.

In my own experience, picking a compatible host from a huge database of offerings can be a challenge. I never really looked for specific jobs, though. I would usually just look at the way a listing was written and the level of care that went into the words they used to ask strangers to help them out. As I mentioned, there’s a lot you can learn from the way someone decides to write down their words. But this pales in comparison to the life lessons you’ll learn from actually stepping out into the world and helping random strangers build their dreams.

From restaurants in the middle of nowhere to a retiree’s little slice of heaven, volunteering brings perspective, insights, and a sense of connection to places like few other forms of travel can hope to deliver. To illustrate my point, I’ll tell you about five of my most memorable volunteering gigs and the ways they taught me important life lessons along the way.

A good swear word is half the job

My first ever volunteering job brought me to the arid plains of Kakheti, in the southern part of Georgia near the Azerbaijan border. The plan was to wait out the tail end of winter while doing something meaningful, before setting off to explore the Lesser Caucasus mountains when the snows would be gone. Up until that point I’d been hiking and traveling non-stop for about two months, and I was looking forward to staying in one place for a while.

I managed to find a taxi driver willing to drive me for two hours to reach the remote village of Udabno. This had all the makings of an interesting project; Udabno was once part of a Soviet agricultural program, where the surrounding semi-desert was shaped into productive farmland with extensive irrigation projects and government support. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, so did the infrastructural lifelines to the village. People moved away, and the village almost turned into a ghost town—a place where even the tourist buses to the nearby cave monasteries wouldn’t stop.

That is, until a Polish couple decided to buy some land along the main road and build a little restaurant there. By employing locals to supply the restaurant and cook local meals in the kitchen, the place didn’t only become popular with tourists. In no time, local villagers saw the potential for tourism and other small businesses popped up, turning the fate of the village and launching the Polish couple into local superstardom. At some point even the government took notice and installed LED street lights, a modern service point with ATMs, and an administrative helpdesk for locals in a bid to help revive the village.

It took a while for me to see the town come alive for the summer season, as the last snow had just disappeared when I arrived. I was to assist my Polish hosts with repainting the restaurant (now expanded to include cabins and a small hostel), but when the taxi dropped me off there was no sign of them. The only occupants in the hostel (the restaurant was still closed) were a burly Polish man called Wojciech and Emma, another volunteer who’d just arrived. As it turned out, Wojciech had spent the winter alone in the hostel as caretaker, and the months of relative isolation had not been too kind to his demeanor.

Not that Wojciech, or ‘Wojtek’ as we would address him, was a bad person to work with. As far as supervisors go, the two of us got along quite well. I think it was because I spoke enough German for him to communicate with me, as his mastery of the English language wasn’t sufficient to communicate with Emma or the other volunteers that showed up in the weeks to come. Wojtek was a man that did things in the ‘old way’; with a sense of diligence and purpose he set himself to any task, not resting until it was completed. And he expected nothing less from those working with him. Between this work mentality and the slight language barrier, some friction existed between him and the younger, less experienced volunteers.

Luckily, these issues were mostly cleared up once our hosts arrived after a week, returning from their yearly winter trip to Poland. With more Polish speakers on site and our team of volunteers growing every few days, we all set to work on splashing a fresh coat of white paint on the restaurant building and getting it ready for the tourist season.

Working with Wojtek turned out to be full of remarkable teaching moments. One day, you would learn all about installing air compressors, while on the next day you could proudly add some new Polish swear words to your international vocabulary. While Wojtek relied on a colorful palette of expletives to support his daily efforts, no other word was more dear to him than ‘Kurwa’, that most Polish of expressions.

Forgot the keys to the shed? Kurwa! An empty paint bucket? Kurwa! Hit his knee on a stack of wood? Kurwa! Volunteers not following instructions? You guessed it, Kurwa!

In spite of his gruff demeanor and colorful vocabulary, he was never really abusive towards us volunteers. We soon learned to appreciate his admittedly rough ways of teaching the less experienced among us the basics of construction and painting. It wasn’t long before our shifts were merrily dubbed the ‘Kurwa Academy of Udabno’ with Wojtek as its headmaster. He never openly said it, but I think he loved that title. Under his tutelage and his slowly improving mood, the work became increasingly pleasant, and in two weeks the restaurant was ready and open for business.

I stuck around for another week and got to know my hosts, Wojtek, and the other volunteers in a way only those who share work, lodging, and camaraderie in a semi-isolated village can. To this day, I still consider that first experience as one of the best I’ve ever had. And thanks to Wojtek, ‘Kurwa’ would help me get through hard jobs for many years to follow.

Working alongside locals offers invaluable insights

One of the main reasons for choosing volunteering jobs over other forms of travel is to get the kind of insider information that is critical in finding unique, lesser known destinations to write about. Helping people build their dream house or maintain their off-grid utopia is all part of the charm, but in the end, I have my own stories to work on as well.

When I landed in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, for the first time, I made sure to have another volunteering job lined up. I was determined to spend some time in the capital to gather information before setting off into the vast open steppe. To this end, I was to help my host, Minjin, with rewriting the English website for her tour company. Not only would this be an easy job in terms of workload, but I was given a private room in a fully furnished apartment as well. After having spent months either living in my tent or sleeping in shared dorms, I was raging at the bits for this level of luxury and the opportunity to dive into my Mongolian adventure.

As it turned out, my host also ran a preschool classroom, which was to be my office during the day. To say that writing web copy while surrounded by curious preschoolers was a unique experience would be underselling the situation. It was a great way to connect with more people than just my host, though. There was John, a foreign English teacher at the school who shared the apartment with me; he would take me to play baseball with another group of kids at an orphanage he volunteered at. There were the Buddhist monks next door, who we would sometimes join for lunch while surrounded by colorful shrines, ornaments and elaborate paintings of horses and mountains.

I quickly settled into a comfortable routine of taking the bus, settling in for a few hours of work, having lunch with teachers and monks, before going off into the city to explore my surroundings. Having a routine like that in a place that is still quite unknown and somewhat alien to you is a unique experience in its own right. But what really set this volunteering job apart from the rest was the sheer amount of local knowledge, insights, and connections I got from working alongside my enthusiastic host and her social circle.

Talking to Minjin taught me so much about the reality of life in Mongolia, the entrepreneurial and independent mindset of modern Mongolian women, and the country’s rich history. Our monk neighbors taught me a little about Tibetan Buddhism and how it is mixed with old shamanistic beliefs. Talks with John filled all the gaps in between, along with valuable insights from a veteran expat’s perspective.

Even though I came to this country alone and without a set plan, I left the city after three weeks with a solid understanding of Mongolian life in the city, a bunch of connections out on the steppe, and a hiking route across some wonderfully remote wilderness that would provide ample material for my blog. Those first few weeks in Mongolia rewarded me with more insights and authentic experiences than months of solo travel could have ever done.

Hard work is your ticket into any community

While volunteering provides ample opportunity to learn about foreign cultures, actually feeling part of a wider community isn’t always as easy as just turning up for a few weeks and asking questions. Especially in Japan, a place where foreigners rarely become accepted into endemic social circles. Nevertheless, I was made to feel welcome and included in a mountain village called Nozawa Onsen by simply doing the work.

The job listing caught my eye as soon as it passed on my screen: a volunteering job in the mountains of Nagano province, working to restore an old house, my own private room decorated with tatami mats and paper screens, all in a village that boasted thirteen free onsen (natural hot springs) for me to visit. To say I was excited to visit would be an understatement.

After a short-lived cycling adventure from Tokyo, where I learned another life lesson on not attempting cycling adventures during hot and humid Japanese summers, I arrived in Iyama by train. From there, an hour-long sweaty uphill struggle brought me to Nozawa Onsen, tucked away among rice terraces, temperate rainforests and the mountain slopes looming over the village. Slopes that become one of the region’s most visited tourist attractions in winter, as thousands of domestic and foreign tourists flood the area in search of fresh powder snow.

None of this was apparent from the way the village looked as I slowly cycled along quiet streets to meet my hosts. I passed small stores, a single gas station, well-kept gardens, and small patches of farmland that gave an impression of a sleepy mountain village. For the most part, this was true. Summer tourism in Nozawa Onsen is almost non-existent, and my hosts made use of the quiet season by renovating and cleaning their rental properties and chopping firewood for those ever-hungry winter fireplaces.

And so I woke up each morning, walked beside mountain streams and along well-kept footpaths to start helping out at the construction site where an old wooden house was being renovated. The work was physically exhilarating and rewarding. We would work from early morning until an hour after noon, followed by a visit to one of the village’s hot springs to relax and wash off the dust and sweat. Some days, I would be assigned to wood-chopping duty, where I got a free workout by chopping an impressive pile of logs and wooden debris down to manageable chunks of firewood.

It must have looked exhausting, seeing a tall, sunburnt Dutch guy laboring away at the woodpile, because on my second day of wood-duty, one of the elderly neighbors approached me while motioning for me to follow him. I made welcome use of the opportunity for a break and was promptly seated in a backyard while being handed a glass of homemade lemonade by his wife. With a few words of Japanese from my side and a little English from theirs, it appeared they were impressed with the work I put in to clear out that eyesore of a woodpile. In gratitude, they gave me a little plastic bag filled with some of their homegrown cucumbers.

As the villagers were used to interacting with foreigners during winter seasons, situations like this were not that rare. After two weeks, the other volunteers and myself were regularly invited to barbeque parties and karaoke nights. We were recognised and greeted in the street, and I soon knew the local shop attendees by name.

Looking back on it, I don’t think the fact that it was a relatively small village was the reason for this welcoming behavior. Sure, my hosts were well known in town, and that must have played a part as well. But we put our backs into making that village a little bit nicer, and I think that type of effort is something that never goes unnoticed.

A good hog roast is its own reward

In Serbia, a culture fundamentally opposite to that of Japan, making local friends is generally a lot easier. Applying the previously learned lesson on hard work and building community relations, I soon found myself embraced by my coworkers on a horse ranch and hostel in Arandjelovac. My host, an older woman with a teenage spirit called Jelena, ran both places with the aim of providing job training for underprivileged local youth.

My youthful coworkers turned out to be quite well-versed in English as a result from working alongside international volunteers over the years. This allowed us to connect quite easily, and it wasn’t long before I was recruited to help out someone’s uncle with bringing in the hay harvest. After having spent the evening manually chucking hay bales onto a truck, our hard work was rewarded in true Balkan fashion with a generous, home cooked feast at the farmer’s house. Given freely and with earnest cheers, the moonshine rakija flowed like a river alongside braised pork legs, bread, cheeses, pork steaks, chicken legs, and salad.

My status among my coworkers went up a notch after that night, as I not only helped out their relatives without hesitation but apparently because I kept up with the flow of rakija throughout the medieval-style feast as well. And as I learned in Japan, this meant the invites for more local celebrations kept coming after that.

A few days later, when the last pigs we consumed were given some time to make their way through our digestive systems, I was greeted with excitement as I left the ranch after my shift. When I asked what all the fuss was about, all I got was a gleeful “Good party tonight, we, errr... prase na raznju! The pig!” The meaning of this cryptic description became clear that evening when I entered a backyard where my colleague just finished setting up a large spit, decorated with an even larger pig, above a huge coal grill.

I was handed a beer, shown the fridge if I wanted more, and engaged in conversation with my host for the evening. When I asked the reason for the second feast this week, he merely shrugged, “Is good night for roast pig”. On that I had to agree. Even though it took the better half of the evening for the hog to be cooked through, and even longer for us to finally get it all in our bellies and get the leftovers sorted while being well and properly stewed ourselves, it really was a good night for roast pig.

Volunteering offers a glimpse into someone’s dreams

While motivations to join a volunteering project can be anything from wanting to learn more about a country to extending one’s travel budget in a meaningful way, sometimes all it takes to send an application is simple curiosity.

Like when I saw Peter’s listing asking for people to help him in Galicia, in northern Spain. His words, conveying a relaxed attitude and an eagerness to entertain people from around the world combined with pictures of a charming old house by a lake, told me enough to press ‘Send email’. Peter, an Irishman who spent his life living and working in the United States, needed help with sorting out small tasks around his house, which he bought a few years earlier to spend his retirement in.

Most of the construction work on the house was done, so now he turned his attention to improving the rest of it; the impressive local wine collection that came with the house needed sorting and labeling, several granite beams needed moving around, and the old forge attached to the premises needed sorting and a good dust-off. Like Peter himself, the tasks turned out to be easy-going, not very demanding, and provided lots of insight into Galician village life.

But the real charm of that project lay in Peter’s own life story, told by him over several lazy evenings where we would fire up the grill and sample the excellent local wines. He told us all about his job in the music industry, about wild stories on the touring trail in the eighties, about his passions and his dreams. Not all of this was told in direct conversation. He would often play us some of his own songs, conjuring up images of a life well spent (and still far from over). The way he talked about local winemaking told us enough about his passion for the product, and the joy he took in showing us the history of his old forge and getting it to work told us enough about his love for the region he chose to live in.

The way Peter showed his enthusiasm for his surroundings certainly conveyed it onto whoever was listening, and I could not help but feel a sense of benign envy for the way he built his little slice of heaven and materialized his dreams

As I wrote earlier, you can learn a lot from the way people choose their words. But interpreting words and forming opinions solely on your own interpretations is a highway to misunderstanding and wrongful assumptions. Instead, I encourage anyone to try stepping out of their comfort zone and helping a stranger out.

Whether it’s cultural insight, lifelong friends, or a good swear word uttered over a roast pig, you never know what you might learn.