This paper explores intensely personal and often intimate stories that, read together, constitute a key movement in the history of humanitarianism. From the early 1950s, young people in Australia, Britain and the United States enacted their concern for distant others by volunteering for development. The decision to volunteer was based on a wide range of motivating factors: professional, personal, emotional and spiritual. Volunteers’ experiences in ‘Third World’ countries from Indonesia to Nigeria were also intensely personal, often including moments of profound self-discovery and intimate or romantic relationships with locals and other foreigners. Yet, taken together, these volunteers’ journeys contributed to, and indeed helped shape, the global system of international development. This paper explores how volunteers’ personal experiences were implicated in global political structures arising from decolonisation and Cold War. It examines the relationship between microhistory and global history by considering the connections between intimate experience and the geopolitics of humanitarianism and international development.