​Darby Logan's ePortfolio

                Why most people volunteer stems from only a small handful of reasons: religion, guilt, help, reward, and a few more.  But what if, instead, one thought about why not to volunteer.  Maybe not exactly not volunteering at all, but more why not volunteer in the ways this society has deemed “most desirable”.  Recently, on the internet, in public, in writing, and in teaching, more and more people have been taking a different view on these more “desirable” and therefore common ways people volunteer today.  They’ve been reviewing these practices, and finding an exasperating amount of flaws and lies.  And this has stemmed even more upheaval and outrage with the normal fields of volunteer work in those who wouldn’t have dug deep enough by themselves.   

Certain types of volunteer work have been encouraged and marketed more than others, for many reasons.  The main tell of these common “opportunities” is just that – the fact that they are opportunities.  They are easy to come by, taking up the smallest amount of time until the volunteers can go back to their everyday lives.  They take a minimal amount of soul-searching and true self-reflection, and may rarely change that person’s life, morals, or standards for more than a few weeks at the maximum.  In a way, the “best ways” society tells us to volunteer are the easiest ways – not the most effective, not the most rewarding, but definitely the briefest brush that is still considered to count. 

                This is what volunteer tourism is all about.  The simplicity and ease of it is what’s so attractive and marketable. 

Sometimes people don’t know any better. But sometimes, they don’t want to.  Voluntourism is grandly promoted by outside sources – the media, mostly – so it is the one that people hear about the most.  Not by that name, it wouldn’t sell that way.  The promoters of voluntourism tell people that it’s good for them, good for the ones they serve, and good for the world.  People are given easy discovery and easy access to these opportunities, because, often, a company somewhere along the chain of distribution is making a profit from it.  Of course, the people who fall into these “opportunities” are not always the ones to blame.  Part of this comes from how we are raised in America.  In “To Hell with Good Intentions”, Illich makes the point that Americans partly feel an obligation to serve abroad because we want to feel physically connected to the world outside of our physical continent.  But he points out that “you cannot help being ultimately vacationing salesmen for the middle-class ‘American Way of Life’ since that is really the only life you know” (2).  He is describing how one of our points of volunteering abroad is to help the people we see as poor to so-called modernize, or what the rest of the world would call westernize or Americanize.  Whether we mean to or not, we see our situation as better than theirs, and therefore we should do what we can to bring them into the same situation and lifestyle we are in. But the problem with that logic hides just beneath the surface. 

                As Adam Davis describes, we are told that “service is good because of the aid it brings to those served, because of the habits… it instills, because of the pleasure it provides…, because of the sense of unity it begets among all parties involved, because it is divinely sanctioned, because of its capacity to move the way things are toward how they ought to be” (3).  It seems that an act so inherently good could not be bad in any way.  But that’s before you bring people themselves into the situation.  It would be lovely to be able to say that nothing can corrupt our acts of kindness.  In the real world, not the world of paper and plans and good intentions, people will shamelessly steal and lie and cheat.  Not all people, but the ones who do are more than willing to screw over some worldly poor American and some monetarily poor native.  Some people are willing to keep children with two living parents in an orphanage in order to make money off of the “volunteers” or tourists that come in day after day or week after week to help these “orphans”.  But these orphans, some of whom are really not orphans at all, get hurt in the process.  Besides these possible physical and sexual abuse by those supposed to take care of them, they are put under severely damaging psychological stress from forming bonds with the tourists who leave them behind, never to be heard from again.  And this happens weekly, sometimes daily for these kids.  And the volunteers go home with pictures with these kids and pictures that were drawn for them, and feel good about what they did. 

                Daniela Papi brings up an excellent point in her TEDx Talk that we are teaching our future generations a volunteer tourism that is really sympathy tourism; we should be teaching empathy.  Sympathy is about pitying someone, while empathy is about understanding, which first requires learning.  She offers a solution to the problem of volunteer tourism: instead of service learning, “if we take the learning service approach, what we’re telling our youth is go abroad, and learn how to serve in the future.” Ernesto Sirolli brings up another approach in his talk, Want to help someone? Shut up and listen!.  He talks about his own experiences, including how, when he went to Zambia and taught the local people to grow Italian foods, they actually had to pay those people to come and work to grow the food, and even then they only showed up sometimes.  He discusses how as Westerners, we tend to treat people in one of two ways: we either patronize them, or we are paternalistic, meaning we either treat them as our servants or as our children, respectively.  His method, which seems to have been extremely effective thus far, is to listen to what the people want and want to do.  But he makes a point that holding a town council meeting won’t do any good.  How you help effectively is to listen to the entrepreneurs, and help them. “So now you’re rebuilding Christchurch without knowing what the smartest people in Christchurch want to do with their own money and their own energy.” Sirolli’s approach is local entrepreneurship, instead of coming in with a foreigner’s ideas. 

                So what we did is bad.  Great.  What does that all mean for us now? Should we give up? We’ve hurt kids and economies and societies, and felt like we’re superheroes.  But there has to be something more.  There has to be a reason that we suck at this so badly, so consistently.  And everyone who attempts to lead us away from this skewed version of help acknowledges that something must be done about this.  But why don’t we see the effects yet? Do we need more people to be involved, or less voluntourism? Whatever we do, we know that we need to do something different.  And that’s why it’s worth trying other options, and talking about other sorts of plans and models, like Papi’s and Sirolli’s.  What we can do right now is change, and encourage others to change with us. 

 

 

 

Works Cited

Baldwin, Christina. Storycatcher: Making Sense of Our Lives through the Power and Practice of Story. Novato: New World Library, 2007. Print.

Block, Peter. Community: The Structure of Belonging.  San Francisco: Berret- Koehler Publishers, 2008. Print.

Block, Peter. "From leadership to citizenship." Insights on Leadership: Service, Stewardship, Spirit, and Servant-leadership. Ed. Larry C. Spears, New York: Wiley, 1998. 87-95. Print.

Coles, Robert. The Call of Service. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1994. Print.

Davis, Adams. “What We Don’t Talk about When We Don’t Talk about Service.” The Civically Engaged Reader: A Diverse Collection of Short Provocative Readings on Civic Activity. Ed. Davis, Adams & Elizabeth Lynn, Chicago: Great Books Foundation, 2006. 148-154. Print.

Illich, Ivan. "To hell with good intentions." An Address to the Conference on InterAmerican Student Projects (CIASP) in Cuernavaca, Mexico, on April. Vol. 20. 1968.

Kretzmann, John, and John P. McKnight. "Assets‐based community development." National Civic Review 85.4 (1996): 23-29.

Papi, Daniela. "What’s Wrong With Volunteer Travel?” Ted.com. TED Talks, Aug. 2012. Web. 14 Oct. 2015.

Sirolli, Ernesto. "Want to Help Someone? Shut up and Listen!" Ted.com. TED Talks, Sept. 2012. Web. 11 Oct. 2015.