If you’re affiliated with a church group, contact the missionaries in the country you want to visit. Staying with them will offer you the opportunity to see life as it’s lived daily by “real” locals; provide a rent-free (or very inexpensive) place to live; and if you offer to help the missionaries with some projects (something as simple as babysitting to give them a day off), you will endear yourself to them forever.
Bonus: you won’t have to learn a foreign language, as you’ll have the missionaries as built-in translators wherever you go.
[Photo: Flickr | sanbeiji]