I recently spent the best three weeks of my life in Bali, Indonesia, and its surrounding islands. If three weeks sounds like an awfully long time for a vacation, it’s because it wasn’t a vacation. For the most part.

Though it has been steadily gaining in popularity over the last few years, many people are still unaware of volunteer tourism, sometimes called voluntourism. And as of late, even those who are aware of it are often skeptical of it, and with reason.

The phenomenon of voluntourism is often associated with a college-aged white female traveling to an impoverished village in Africa to “save the children.” This is the image that makes people believe voluntourism is more about putting forth a good face than actually doing any good. And while there certainly are volunteers and volunteer programs for whom that is true, after spending three weeks volunteering myself, I firmly believe they are in the minority.

The majority of volunteer tourists are indeed college-aged white females, but they are far from the only ones. My fellow volunteers included people from all over the world, such as Mexico, Brazil, Romania and India, as well as plenty of men, a married couple in their 60s, a mother and her two young sons and a 36-year-old woman who was a marketing analyst for Apple. Volunteer tourism is for anyone.

International volunteers are obviously not going to single-handedly stop world hunger or solve the poverty crisis, but most international volunteers don’t have that mentality. In fact, we are taught not to.

Before beginning my program in Bali, I had to complete an online volunteer training course, which cautioned volunteers to be realistic about how much they would be able to do within their program and to be open and understanding to the local project coordinators.

I volunteered through an organization called International Volunteer Headquarters, which is based out of New Zealand and offers volunteer projects in 40 different countries. For the Bali program, they partnered with a local organization called Green Lion to place volunteers in kindergarten, teaching, health care education, construction and renovation or turtle conservation programs.

I did the turtle conservation program, which entailed a one week orientation in the city of Ubud before taking a boat to the island of Nusa Penida, where the Green Lion Turtle Conservatory is located.

The conservatory is run by a local team who live at the volunteer house across the street full time. The director of the conservatory is a man named Augus who grew up on Nusa Penida and decided to start the turtle conservation project after he witnessed someone kill a sea turtle when he was a child.

During my time working at the turtle conservatory, I and the other volunteers cleaned the turtle’s tanks, cut fish and fed the turtles, caught crabs for the turtles, picked up garbage from the island’s beaches and built a concrete garbage bin at a local kindergarten.

During our down time, we had the opportunity to explore the island and interact with the locals, including the conservatory team members.

I talked about religion with a man from the island of Java, who told me that even though the majority of people on his island were Muslim, their culture and traditions aligned much more closely with Hinduism.

I learned about the effort to keep up the dying art of Batik painting from a Balinese native who had recently returned from studying art at a university in Sydney, Australia.

I talked about the struggles of college with a girl who was going to community college in Ubud and who taught me the basics of the Indonesian language.

I learned about the seven different species of sea turtles and the dangers, both human and inhuman, they face, and I was able to release an eight month old sea turtle back into the ocean, which was a truly indescribable moment.

Though simply traveling gives someone the opportunity to view a culture, volunteering gives someone the opportunity to immerse themselves in that culture. I met so many people I otherwise wouldn’t have and got to experience so many different parts of a truly beautiful place.

It is true that some volunteers see the places they travel to as poverty stricken and pathetic and in need of a well-meaning Westerner to save the day. And it is true that that is a dangerous narrative. But I saw Bali and Nusa Penida as lively and thriving. The children are smart and playful and the adults are helpful and friendly. Nobody needed me there, but they were happy to have me. And I was happy to be there.

It’s obviously important to thoroughly research a volunteer organization and the countries they serve before deciding to participate in an international volunteer project, but I had an incredible experience, and I would recommend it to anyone.

Madeleine Coles is a reporter for the Idaho State Journal and a senior at Idaho State University studying journalism. In her free time, she likes to travel and write poetry, and her work has been published in ISU’s literary magazine, Black Rock and Sage.