Editor’s note: Volunteer vacations are one of the fastest growing segments in the travel business, as more and more people look for a way to give back on their journeys. There are dozens of organizations offering these voluntourism packages. One in particular is Airline Ambassadors, which operates an average of 10 trips per month to help orphanages around the world. And these special trips are not just for adults. In many cases, parents are encouraged to bring their children. Here is the first person story of one of those Airline Ambassador trips, written by one of the kids who went …

Three years ago, when I was just 12, I took a trip to Buenos Aires, Argentina. This trip wasn’t done as a typical vacation to enjoy pretty scenery (though the scenery was pretty). This was a trip taken for a better cause, to work with other volunteers (along with my mother and grandparents) to help change the world for the better. This was an Airline Ambassadors experience.

Airline Ambassadors, founded and headed by San Francisco-based flight attendant Nancy Rivard, has been making an enormous impact on the world for more than 10 years. It all started when Rivard got a chance to see how others really lived during her layovers between flights in foreign countries. “Slowly a vision started to come to me,” she says, “that travel—the largest industry in the world—could play a far more important role in spreading goodwill, sharing and understanding between people and cultures.”

The resulting organization is one that provides aid to children and families in need worldwide. Airline employees might use their flight passes to escort children to receive medical care; members may deliver humanitarian aid to communities three to 10 times a month; youths can spend two weeks in a cultural exchange program. “I decided to try to create a way that ordinary people could directly meet real needs for children and families,” says Rivard.

I went into my experience in Argentina with few expectations, and plenty of reservations. My previous experiences with charitable giving had been fairly unfocused and unrewarding. But I quickly found that each day in Argentina revealed a moment, a conversation, or a realization that truly was life-altering. I could help others, and in the process I learned so much about how to communicate that experience to my friends back home in California.

On day one, we visited a school of unprivileged children, both to give out Christmas presents and make them beaded bracelets. What was so incredible about this was the kids’ own generosity. Many of them actually gave us the bracelets as gifts for our selflessness. This really demonstrated to me how beautiful the human heart is, to have close to nothing and still have the drive to give and not just take.

Each day of an Airline Ambassadors trip is greeted with a new charitable action. Every morning we left our hotel and rode a bus to another pocket of land around Buenos Aires. After working with the school children, we went on a mission to serve food to hungry children.

On another particularly memorable day, we delivered beds to a home for the mentally challenged. Walking in the front door, I had no idea what to expect. The people there were most certainly beyond the social norm.

Many of these people are those that if you were to see under almost any circumstance, you would do your best to avoid. But just one conversation brought everything back to Earth. I recall one boy who was extremely fond of me, and we learned to talk to each other as if we had been best friends for 10 years. The whole thing really opened my eyes and gave me a completely new perspective on an entire group of people that one is quick to overlook.

Airline Ambassadors has evolved greatly since its pioneer voyage in 1993, when Rivard and two other flight attendants, delivered hotel amenities to refugee women of the Bosnian crisis in Kyoto, Japan. “We began mainly as flight attendants using our time off and flight benefits to help children, but since then we have grown to over 6,000 members, from all ages and professions,” explains Rivard. “We have hand delivered over $50 million in aid to children in orphanages, schools and remote communities,”

In recent months, Airline Ambassador members have led volunteers to New Orleans to help rebuild homes for displaced families, and to a Mexican border town where they worked with children of local orphanages. Perhaps most impressively, member LeiLei Thein made it into her native country of Myanmar this past May to distribute more than 100 “shelter boxes” to cyclone survivors.

But the evolution in the organization is far from over. “We want to create an infrastructure for hundreds of thousands of people to positively impact the global community,” says Rivard. “American Airlines is going to feature us on their in-flight video soon and we are thrilled that more people will learn about our work and ways to become active assisting our global family.”

From New Orleans to Haiti to Brazil, Airline Ambassador volunteers have done, and will continue to do more than their fair share of charity all worldwide. Life-changing moments abounded throughout my experience, which is why I recommend an Airline Ambassadors trip to anybody who wants to live in a world of caring.

I was 12 when I did my first Airline Ambassadors mission, but children from the age of 7 can go, if accompanied by a parent.

To find out how you can get involved in an Airline Ambassadors mission or to send a donation, go to www.airlineamb.org.

By Ben Benjamin for PeterGreenberg.com.

Check out the volunteers in action in this video on Volunteer Vacations.

Don’t miss our Top Voluntourism Opportunities for Teens and Students.

Or get more general information about Voluntourism Opportunities.

Previously by Ben Benjamin: The Teen Traveler on Entertaining Gadgets.