'Global Volunteers' Pay to Be Good Samaritans

IT took Tony Terzi more than 25 years to confront the troubling memories he brought back from Vietnam. The Long Island, N.Y., resident now says it was the chance to help the people he had fought a generation ago that prompted him to return there.

"Going back was the greatest thing I have done in almost 30 years," says Mr. Terzi, who returned to Mytho (a town in southern Vietnam) with a team of volunteers this February. "Just to have touched one person, it was overwhelming. If people were walking by and they saw you working hard, they jumped right in to help.... It was incredible that they did not show the slightest tinge of animosity."

Terzi signed up for a three-week stint with Global Volunteers, a nonprofit, Minnesota-based organization that places American volunteers with developing communities around the world. "I thought that going back as a tourist would be artificial; I wanted to give something back," says Terzi, who had come back from the war with a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart, and a belief that the war was wrong. "I spent 13 months destroying the country; the least I could do is help build it back up for three weeks."

Global Volunteers has been sending teams to Vietnam for more than a year, though the United States did not normalize relations with its former nemesis until July.

Eleven years ago, Bud Philbrook and his wife, Michelle Gran, started up the organization with the intention of helping others. "I was one of 11 kids, and my mom taught us all that our purpose in life should be to serve others," says Mr. Philbrook, whose eyes brighten as he talks about a subject he is clearly passionate about. "Her philosophy is that we can bring people together to wage peace, just as governments wage war. For me, it's that simple."

Global Volunteers began with nine volunteers, if "you count me twice," he says. Now it sends more than 1,000 volunteers in 90 teams to places as far away as Vietnam and Tanzania and as close as Mississippi and Arkansas. "We not only have trips abroad but we have, much to people's surprise, trips to places here at home," Philbrook says, alluding to how the economy of rural Mississippi is not that different from that of places overseas.

'This is so intense'

"Global Volunteers always does a good job of preparing their people before they go out," says David Minich, director of Habitat for Humanity's global village work camp program, "so that they are well-organized and well-focused when they are out in the field. They are definitely an organization that we look up to."

Former newspaper business executive Linda Schlaap also went to Vietnam. "I have become a Global groupie," says Ms. Schlaap, who has been on three trips this year and hopes to become a team leader. "These people have practically nothing, and they still insisted on giving me things. I spent half my time there thinking to myself, 'Wow, this is so intense.' "

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