I'm planning on documenting my travels in Italy on my own website (www.abirdinthekitchen.com), but I think it makes sense to post the entries here as well. When I was researching trips to take last year I found it helpful to read other people's journals, so hopefully I can be just as helpful to someone else.

-original post at www.abirdinthekitchen.com-

I’ve always had a travel bug. For as long as I can remember I’ve wanted to see the world; to get out of whatever dinky little town I was living in and experience what other cultures had to offer. I like tasting new foods, hearing new tongues, and discovering the ins and outs of foreign lands.

I knew when I finished my degree that I wanted to go volunteer somewhere. I’ve spent the last 4 years with my nose stuck in a textbook and my fingers glued to a keyboard writing papers. I wanted to get out in the world and contribute something before I settled down to become a contributing member of society (financially speaking, at least). I wanted to build a house for a downtrodden family or teach a kid to read. I wanted to save seahorses or chart migration patterns of cheetahs or search for frogs in the Amazon in middle of the night, flashlight in hand.

But it seemed the more I looked into these various programs, the more I became concerned about what my influence might actually be in these programs and on these communities. I developed extensive lists of questions for organizations about their short and long-term goals in the communities, benchmarks they’d achieved and success they’d had. It seemed the more questions I asked, the fewer answers anyone had. It seemed I couldn’t be sure of whether or not my presence on a project would actually do more harm than good.

About a year ago I had run across a program for language tutors in foreign countries. I was interested, but to commit the length of time I wanted (approximately three months) I had to wait until I was done with school. The program has multiple options, but the one I was most interested in involved working in schools with students and teachers. I am ultimately interested in working with kids about choose healthy foods, so it seemed like a decent way to test the waters.

Furthermore, the cultural perspective regarding food in countries like Italy is vastly different than our own. Additionally, although the rates are rising, they are glaringly absent of the majority of diet-related lifestyle diseases present in the United States. Being able to both work with students and teachers in Italy, while experiencing the culture firsthand and gaining a greater understanding of how they feel about food – and therefore prevent conditions like obesity, diet-related diabetes, heart disease and other maladies prevalent in the Western world – seemed like the perfect solution to my desire to volunteer.

So I’m going. Soon. In just two weeks, in fact. I am at once both terrified and excited. I will be living with two families over the course of my three month stay near Civitanova Marche. I’ll be right on the Adriatic Coast, about three hours northeast of Rome. This subsection of my website will detail my exploits in Italy, both food-related and otherwise. I can’t guarantee the regularity of updates, but I hope they will be frequent and informative.