What’s it like to drop everything and leave the world you know to live as a volunteer in Latin America for two years?

Patrick Furlong is eager to let you know, and his blog, Oh The Places You’ll Go, is opening a window on his brave new world. Catholic News Service has the details behind it:

“You leave your family, you leave your friends, and you know that you’re going to be gone for two years,” said Patrick Furlong. “A lot changes. When I get back, I don’t know what it’s going to be like.”

Leaving the United States for two years, living on $60 a month and washing his laundry by hand wasn’t where Furlong expected to find himself in five years when he graduated from high school and left his native Albuquerque, N.M., to attend Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

But Furlong’s experiences in college led him down a path of service that continues to inspire and amaze not just him, but anyone who reads the Web log, or blog, he writes as a witness to his life.

Furlong has been serving with the Holy Cross Associates for the last 12 months. He keeps his blog — http://pjfurlong.blogspot.com — with the hope that college students considering volunteer work after graduation might catch a glimpse of what it is like in the trenches.

He described his doubts, his trials and the joy he has found as a volunteer with the Holy Cross Associates in a telephone interview with Catholic News Service this summer from Santiago, Chile. In August he headed to another volunteer position in Quito, Ecuador, to teach poor children and their parents 12 hours a day, five days a week.

Furlong said his decision to commit to a service program came from the experiences he had on alternative school-break trips in college. Serving in places such as Kentucky, Guatemala, Ecuador, the Dominican Republic and Mexico introduced Furlong to a poverty he couldn’t ignore.

He recalled a woman he met after a hard day in Mexico whose comments crystallized his need to volunteer.

“She said, ‘You have an obligation to do something about this. You’ve seen it. You can’t turn your back on it,'” he said. “That’s what it means to get ruined by poverty. After you’ve seen what you’ve seen, you can’t forget it.”

Furlong’s blog isn’t an advertisement. He said his life as a volunteer has been a joyful but difficult one. There are things he wished he had known before he got to Chile, but they are things that can’t be learned from brochures or recruiters.

He said he hopes his blog will provide answers to questions that potential volunteers don’t even know they have, volunteers who might be — as he was — a little naive about life as a volunteer.

Read more up at the link, or at his blog, to get a rare glimpse at Furlong’s life.