Between course loads, part-time jobs, labs, group projects, and bustling personal lives, most Canadian undergrads today don’t have the spare time to fit in a service trip abroad.
If you’re an undergrad who wants international experience in the world of healthcare, development, or poverty reduction, multi-month programs abroad usually clash with your schedule, your budget, or both. That’s why short-term volunteer opportunities for students can fill that gap, as long as they’re built around the needs of the community you’re serving and not only around your personal calendar.
Fit A Trip Into Reading Week
Most Canadian universities have fall and winter reading weeks plus a several-month long summer break. MEDLIFE’s Service Learning Trips typically run one to two weeks, which makes them easy to fit inside those windows instead of costing you good chunk of a semester.
Service Learning Trips take place in Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala, Tanzania, and Costa Rica. You’ll spend your time being immersed in ethical field education and service alongside local health professionals and community members for one to two weeks.
MEDLIFE’s short-term service trips are ideal for students who wish to participate in sustainable service abroad but who also cannot afford to be away from their studies for extended periods of time.
What You’ll See And Learn On The Ground
Global health issues look and feel completely different outside a textbook. On a SLT, you’ll spend time assisting in mobile clinics and community development projects led and designed by local physicians, nurses, and community leaders. Your role there is to observe and assist in the flow of the clinic. You won’t be providing medical care; that work belongs to the licensed local health professionals. Student volunteers typically work in triage taking patients names and vitals, assisting with guiding patients through different stations, serving as an assistant to the doctors and nurses, and handing out medications in the pharmacy station.
What this provides is a close look at how primary care is delivered in the medically underserved communities MEDLIFE partners with. You’ll also see the social determinants of health in person: the housing, water access, income, and distance to care that shape who gets sick and who gets treated.
Guided reflection during the trip also helps you connect what you see to what you’re studying back home. That context tends to stay with you long after you’re home, whatever career you end up in.
Why The Community Leads
A one-week trip can’t change a community’s health all on its own, and it shouldn’t try to. That’s the difference between ethical short-term volunteer opportunities for students and “voluntourism.” The work doesn’t start or end with your specific visit. Rather, it is an ongoing relationship between the MEDLIFE staff and the leaders of our partner communities.
Ethical global health work means putting local partnership ahead of short-term intervention. MEDLIFE’s SLTs are a part of year-round, community-led health projects and follow-up care run by local staff. You as a participant simply get to join that work for a short stretch; the local team carries it the rest of the year based on the input and specific needs of each individual community.
Logistics And Cost
Planning independent international travel as a student is a lot of work. That’s why MEDLIFE’s SLTs come with field logistics, safety protocols, and local guidance already in place, so you can focus on learning and serving first.
Because trips are short, costs are significantly lower than a semester abroad. To afford the trip costs, many students fundraise through their campus MEDLIFE chapter or independently, and some universities even offer travel grants that can help cover expenses.
Get started today!
A short trip abroad can’t replace a full university course, but it can show you what the fight for health equity looks like outside of your home country, and why long-term partnership and collaboration are the path towards it.
If you’re looking for short-term volunteer opportunities for students that fit into a busy school schedule, or you’re interested in starting a MEDLIFE chapter at your university, fill out the form below!