Greeny News

Helpx brings people who need a break working group in conjunction with projects that help and want to restoration of the chocolate production

The attempt to organize a working holiday as adventurous student years felt like an expedition in itself. Spending six weeks fruit picking didn 't seem interesting enough, and everything costs more stimulating to the price of a Louis Vuitton suitcase. I ended up spending the entire summer vacation in the local hotel or hospital.

Many students around the world were in a similar situation, I think. But while we're looking for excitement, Rob Prince - was engaged in a very simple website that make our lives easier - to work an experienced traveler.

Prince, now 42, spent much of his early 20s traveling in Australia and New Zealand to find work, the farmers 'Notes to the hostel boards. When the Internet arrived a few years later, he saw an opportunity to find the working holiday easier, and so created the Helpx website. Short for Help Exchange, it started in 2001 and now lists more than 5,000 active projects, the aid workers need from the eco-house builds to small chocolate company makes or yoga centers.

I'm now in my 30s and have just spent two memorable months travelling around Europe "HelpXing" at all sorts of places - from a rustic 13th-century monastery in the green hills of Aveyron, France, to an Austrian bar snuggled in the Tyrolean mountains.

I walked away, as someone who fought a tool to open and came back, an amateur-sander, gardener and chicken keeper, how to plaster walls with white again. I also have a deeper understanding of European cultures by living and working conditions with the local population.

Most of the couple's helpers are in their 20s, and she says she and her partner enjoy getting an insight into a generation that had been a bit of a mystery to them. "We like hearing about their lives and what we've learned after hosting 27 volunteers is that many people are not getting the opportunity to learn basic practical skills at home or in education and this is going to be a problem in the future," Gregory-Cullen says. "We hope that, on leaving, our helpers have learned something practical, and also something about their capabilities."