The Hunt

I've been wanting to travel to France during my year off after high school for a while now. I wanted to keep busy, gain some life-changing experiences, and maintain my French-- something I`m deathly afraid of losing after 12 years in French immersion. I knew I wouldn't have enough money to just go travelling, so I originally wanted to get a job in France as an au pair so that I could make a little money and do some travelling at the same time. This didn't really work out when I looked at a number of au pair websites and saw that most of them required 2 reference letters from previous babysitting employers. I had babysat for a family for about a year, until they moved west of the city, and I had no way of contacting them. Other than them, I just babysat people on and off-- not enough to get a reference letter out of them. Secondly, I asked myself, do I really want to be babysitting for 5 hours a day, 6 days a week for 2 months? I never really enjoyed it, I just did it for some extra money. That's when I started to look at work experience in France, but all the programs I was looking at had sky-high fees, and I would only receive a stipend of around 180 euros a month-- that works out to about a dollar an hour. My only option left was to volunteer. I decided this really was the best thing for me. I would like to use my time off not only to profit myself, but to help someone else out, and actually make a difference in someone's life without having a price tag attatched to it. The internet is a sea of volunteer oportunities, and I was completely lost. Everything I came across had fees in the $1000 and $2000US range-- not including airfare. I took my mom's advice and joined slow talk, a message board out of slow travel. I posted my dilemma: I'm taking a year off from high school, I don't have much money, and I want to volunteer in France. Where do I start? I received several helpful responses, one of them suggesting I should join WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms). I joined for only $30US, and I got a list of 316 independant hosts in France who wanted help on their organic farms, and in exchange would provide room and board.