About the Author
Amy E. Robertson has been passionate about volunteer vacations since she was 13, when she took her first service trip with Habitat for Humanity. Since then, she's traveled far and wide, visiting more than 60 countries and living in six. She has lived in Ecuador and Honduras and traveled in 12 other mainland Latin American countries (plus four in the Caribbean). In that time, Amy explored the snow-capped mountains, animal-packed jungles, sandy beaches, and temples of the Maya that make up this diverse area. She fell in love with the rich culture of the modern Quechua and the ancient Incas and found passion for salsa dancing. The volunteer experiences she had—from building homes in Honduras, to monitoring presidential elections in Ecuador, to working with youth in Bolivia on the creation of social documentaries—helped her to better understand the people she met and enriched her as much as it did those she supported.
Amy has a background in international development and nonprofit management, and has worked in both private and nonprofit sectors. She applied that expertise, as well as the advice and experiences of her extensive network of passionate “voluntourist” friends and colleagues, to her evaluation of volunteer programs for this book.
Amy is a Seattle native who has long been obsessed with travel. She studied in Boston and Madrid for her bachelor's degree and London for her master's degree in development studies (where she also met her husband, who hails from Italy). In 2012, after eight years living in Latin America, Amy moved with her husband and two children to Beirut, Lebanon. She spends three months a year divided between her family's hometowns: Seattle, Rome, and Messina, Sicily. She is the author of Moon Honduras & the Bay Islands, and her writing has been published in National Geographic Traveler, Christian Science Monitor, and Travel + Leisure, among others.
