How many of you have ever been on a service trip, or know anyone how has taken part in a volunteer trip? If your hand went up you, or someone you know are one of the millions of young adults who have set out each year with the goal of making a positive impact on the world. Well, I’m here today to tell you that saving the world isn’t quite as easy as it seems. Volunteer tourism, or voluntourism, is a multi-million dollar industry based on the emerging trend of travel linked to the action of “doing good”. Yet although these efforts to help people and the environment are usually praised, they have recently come under heavy scrutiny by some; and for good reason. I believe that volunteer travel is providing quick fixes for large social issues, and when not done carefully our good intentions can end up causing more harm than good. My goal today is to raise awareness about the overlooked effects that occur once a service group leaves a community, yet more importantly, I want to change the mindset of students who are considering ever going abroad to help.
I know what you might be thinking. What could possibly be wrong about playing with orphans in Cambodia, building houses in Haiti or bringing brand new shoes and water filters to a school in South Africa? The reality is that volunteer trips are designed to emotionally benefit the visitor. So while the traveler gets to return home with a large sense of achievement and pride, the communities are left behind to fend for themselves once again. As well stated by Dr. Samantha Nutt, a physician with more than sixteen years of experience in war zones across the world, “Volunteer travel is making a spectacle out of poverty and reinforcing outdated stereotypes about developing countries”(1). We have all probably come across the images of young and eager volunteers being held onto by adorable kids with smiles from ear to ear with some third world looking village in the background, sound familiar right? I’ll bet that what you don’t think of when scrolling past those pictures is the psychological damage that those children endure due to the constant rotation of new volunteer groups coming in and out; leaving them with a sense of abandonment every time their “new friends” depart once again. How about the fact that giving out shoes and water filters can actually harm local markets and take revenue away from their business. Or that building a school may be nice, but you need to stick around long enough to find the teachers who will fill the building because at the end of the day schools don’t teach children, people do.
If you have ever spoken to me, you most likely know that I myself spent four weeks abroad this summer traveling across the breathtaking Andes Mountains in South America. If I’m being honest I had no freaking idea what I was getting myself into when I signed up to spend a month in a foreign country with a group of fourteen people that I had never met before. Before embarking on my trip this past June, I had never seen anything wrong with volunteer travel, in fact, I thought that going abroad to help those less fortunate was the most amazing thing an individual could do with their time. As you can most likely assume, I returned home after thirty days in Peru with a completely contrasting opinion on the subject. The course I went on was lead by three overqualified, diverse and passionate educators who strived to enlighten us on how to be travelers, not tourists, how to leave a long-lasting positive impact behind when stepping foot on foreign territory, and most importantly how to shift our focus from service learning to learning service, a simple concept that emphasizes that we must learn before we can even think about helping. Through endless hours of instructor-led group discussions about the global developmental issues facing our world today, and a presentation on a TED Talk delivered by Daniela Papi about her personal experience with the harm of volunteer travel, I came to the realization that this is an issue that all young adults need to be educated about.
Papi, the founder of a youth leadership organization, narrows her focus down to the orphanage tourism market. Stating that, “In Cambodia, anyone off the streets is allowed to walk in and play with vulnerable kids, and have those same kids do dance shows night after night for visiting travelers” (2). She followed this by quoting a UNICEF article that claimed, “that three out of four Cambodian “orphans” in orphanages have one or both living parents” (2). What tourist do not realize is that this system is fueling the separation between children and their parents, and I’m assuming that is not what they signed up to do. On top of that, to keep an influx of tourist coming into these facilities many orphanages have been found purposely maintaining disgusting conditions so that visitors are compelled to donate more money.
Discussing these issues is a completely different story than actually experiencing them first hand, and I can say that from the month I spent abroad there were some things that not only got me thinking but personally affected me as well. Our group spent five days in a remote village in the Amazon rainforest called Boka Pairumani, fives days in which we attempted to take in every bit of culture as possible while learning as much about the community as we could. When the time came to say goodbye to the villagers who had so open-heartedly let us into their homes, Vanessa, a young girl full of life, who had managed to nutmeg half of our group during our soccer matches came up to me whispered in my ear, “prometeme que vas a volver” which translates to “promise me you’ll come back” and that’s a promise I’m planning on keeping.
So, what am I suggesting as an alternative to volunteer travel? Well, before that we must get it out of our heads that simply because we come from what is considered to be a more developed country, we have the answer to everything because quite frankly we don’t. I am here today to encourage young adults to go abroad with the goal of learning and to return home with more questions about the world than the ones they left with.
