Overseas Volunteering/Expatriotism?

Well you sound a lot like a friend of mine who is a retiree from Australia (he used to work for the navy). He has now permanently settled in India and spends his retirement years working at a school for disabled women as well as an NGO that helps commercialize art created by underprivileged tribal and rural folk. For him, this is easy because he's still getting his retirement money from the navy so he doesn't really have to forego creature comforts in order to also help the world and make a huge impact. For you it would be a little bit different because you would have to also get paid jobs and have some kind of financial security. But before you even thinking of moving to a few countries for such long periods of time, you need to get a full scope and idea of what the place is like. That's what he did. He went through an organization that links up volunteers to NGOs in India three years ago. Then he came back every summer with that organization up until now where he feels comfortable enough to have gotten his own place and set up a steady flow of work for himself as well as make contacts. Now he himself has set up an organization called Leave UR Mark that helps people do short-term volunteer work. So, in your case I suggest that you come for around 2 months and get a feel for the location, the work, the people, and the lifestyle. Once you feel settled in, you can then do it on your own and settle for several years. I would not recommend going to any of these third world countries completely by yourself for the first few months. You will actually end up spending more money (nothing like a volunteer tourist for locals to rip you off) than you realize because you're not familiar with the cheap places and cheap way of doing things yet. Come through a project with Leave UR Mark, and then venture off on your own a couple of months later. For a two month trip with Leave UR Mark it would cost you around: $2,250 with food, lodging, airport pickup/drop off, orientation, country support included. After those two months, you will know exactly what to do. You can check out the projects here: a href="http://www.leaveurmark.com" rel="nofollow"http://www.leaveurmark.com/a