Many years ago we took our daughter out of public middle school and sent her to a local evangelical Lutheran private school. It was the least expensive of the several private schools in the area and was well-regarded. Seventh grade had been scary year, as middle school years often are. The last straw was when one of her friends had broken into a dentist’s office to get high on the nitrous oxide and killed himself. We were agnostics, but not against many of the precepts of the mainstream protestant churches. My daughter loved it and joined the tennis team. At the team’s parent meeting, the coaches began handing out the athletic clothes families had ordered. When they began handing out many expensive sportswear items for my daughter, I realized she had ordered them without asking me. We had limited incomes at the time and the $8K for the school was enough for us to fork over, we thought. I told the coaches that there had been a mistake and we had not given permission for all the sportswear.
We went home without the clothes. One week later I received an anonymous letter. When I opened it, it contained enough cash to pay for all the items with a note. “I hope this helps with the sportswear.” I was, first, humiliated and, second, outraged. I returned the cash to the school with the note saying I was teaching my daughter thrift and the need to check with parents before spending a lot of money. Their notion of Christian charity was very misplaced. She was not happy at the time, but almost 30 years later she is very disciplined with her money and very creative in finding other ways to bring non-essentials and beauty into her life. How does this relate to voluntourism—the combining of travel with some kind of voluntary service? Read on.
One of the many reasons I started this travel blog was that during my travels and work in developing countries I saw lots of ways in which tourists wanted to help the relatively worse off by charitable acts. The well-worn joke among Western expats working in developing countries is that their counterparts are either military, missionarioes, or misfits. I saw examples of all of them. Many tourists, likewise, were well-meaning and helpful, some were well-meaning and unhelpful, and some were downright opportunist and even evil. So far, I have stayed away from pointing fingers and saluting the good, but during this interim while I am not traveling, here goes. My goal is to offer some examples to all the well-meaning travelers out there, who might be considering some kind of voluntourism.
And the winners are, in reverse order…
Opportunist and/or evil: I met an evangelical missionary at a hotel in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, there for a meeting with his Southeast Asian team. I asked him about his work. He said they were setting up and running orphanages for poor rural children. There they would be taught the 3 R’s and the awesome power of Jesus Christ. I asked him if they were really orphans. He admitted they were not, but the Buddhist parents had basically signed them over to Jesus because they could not afford public school fees. I am sure he got lots of well-meaning evangelicals to donate, based on a lie. How is this different from the boarding schools set up for American Indian children to separate them from their (inferior) culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_boarding_schools ?
Well-meaning, but not helpful: In my work organizing training in trauma-informed care for some Cambodian professionals working with street children I learned that that many Western tourists asked them to arrange a one or two week volunteer session so they could vounteer with the children directly. Implied was a subsequent donation or ongoing financial support. The staff reluctantly arranged these short stays because they needed the money, but complained that it took a lot of time and, worse, it was hard on the children to have these happy, playful tourists enter their lives (not speaking the language) and then leave, never to return again, resulting in some, albeit mild, retraumatization.
Well-meaning and helpful: One time when I was again in Phnom Penh for work, I ran into two old American friends from my college days at a local resto. I asked what brought them there. They said they had come as tourists during their summer break a few years ago (teacher and self-employed property assessor). They had witnessed all the destitute children begging and huffing on the tourist main street and vowed to go home and decide what they could do to help. The next time they came, they met a Cambodian couple who had started a boarding school for children whose families were garbage pickers at the huge dump at the edge of town. They toured the school and were very impressed with the number of children who had not only completed high school but were on their way to university. All the teachers were Khmer and they taught in Khmer but also taught English. They committed to raising money for the school in the US and spent many summers at the school setting up and running the computer lab.
What makes this last story an example of voluntourism done right? (pause while the reader answers the question) 1. The tourists committed to one organization, run and staffed by locals that aimed to support parents by providing education for their children with no hidden agenda. 2. They focused on the kind of support that the locals really wanted: funds and capacity-building (setting up and running a computer lab) 3. They marshalled the skills they already had (teaching and accessing a network of people who could afford to donate). 4. They spent enough time at the site to judge that the NGO was an honest and effective one.
What can make well-meaning help unhelpful? 1. If it steps in and runs services that locals are already doing or could be doing if they were given needed capacity-building. 2. If it is done to make the volunteer feel good, without regard to its helpfulness to either clients or staff.
I am interested in any experiences the reader may have had with good, bad or awful voluntourism. Add your comments! For more on this: http://www.huffpost.com/entry/opinion-sullivan-volunteering-abroad_n_5a7de894e4b044b3821d1627
Other states, other lives, other souls 