THE CANADIAN PRESS

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TORONTO - Caring for orphans in India, restoring a medieval village in France or helping autistic children on Vancouver Island. These are just a few of the ways in which travellers seeking to improve the lives of others or the state of the planet can donate their time, talents and energy.

The new book "Frommer's 500 Places Where You Can Make a Difference" (John Wiley & Sons) details numerous possibilities for "voluntourism," grouping them into categories such as animal welfare, working with children, healing the environment, building better communities, peace-building and spiritual service.

Service travel has been around a long time, writes author Andrew Mersmann, but "the easy availability of these trips is somewhat new."

"Almost anyone can escape their day-to-day existence, immerse themselves in another culture and make a valuable contribution while they're there."

Volunteers can commit for varying lengths of time. In India they can stay between one week and three months to help at orphanages in Bangalore, Delhi and other locations.

A two-week program near Avignon, France, involves restoring a village's stone structures using traditional methods. And at a day camp in Courtenay, B.C., volunteers get a week of training before spending two weeks with autistic kids aged 10 to 15.

Other Canadian options listed in the book include working on village improvements at a Stoney Nakoda First Nations reserve in southwest Alberta; introducing at-risk kids to sports in Ontario communities; helping with the annual eight-day pilgrimage from Guelph, Ont., to the Jesuit Martyrs' Shrine near Midland; and teaching art, music and gardening to seniors in Vancouver.

Mersmann argues that three disasters in the past decade - the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia and hurricane Katrina in 2005 - changed attitudes to misfortune.

"(The events) brought the average person's compassion to the surface and translated it into action in an unprecedented way," he writes. "It has become a time that people look to themselves to try to do something."