Volunteer Tourism

Hundreds of thousands of young people go abroad to volunteer each year, as part of school requirements, to build their CVs, and as part of gap year trips.
 

I have been slightly concerned about the impact of such trips for some since hearing about the experience of a young person I know who went overseas volunteering to Uganda for three months. Part of her role was to talk to young Ugandans about sexual health and contraception and she soon realised this was an extremely challenging in view of a host of local cultural issues that she had not been prepared for, not the least of which being: why would teenage African village boys listen to a young English white woman lecturing them about sexual behaviour? There were other issues of concern relating to corruption, the overabundance of NGOs and the stock-piling of contraceptives which were also an eye opener.
 

On this subject, there was a very interesting programme broadcast on Radio Four last week that caught quite a lot of attention. ‘Four Thought’ was a talk presented by Daniela Papi who spent six years living in Cambodia where she founded PEPY, an educational development organization and PEPY Tours, a development education travel company.
 

Based on her experience, she now believes that whilst young people volunteering overseas to build schools, help in orphanages or dig wells and such like might feel good about themselves, their activities can in some instances be actually detrimental to those they are purportedly helping.
 

Overseas volunteering is a huge industry. However, “much of this demand is fuelled by the belief that because we come from financially wealthier countries, we have the right, or the obligation, to bestow our benevolence on people. Never mind if we don't speak the language, don't have the skills or experience to qualify for the jobs we're doing, or don't know anything about what life is like in the country we volunteer in”.
 

In her words, “when we go to volunteer abroad, we sometimes forget that we have to learn before we can serve. We take off to a far-away country and somehow our Superman suit or our volunteer T-shirt gives us all of the power and knowledge we need to save the world”.
 

Ms Papi argues that good intentions are not enough and our lack of critical engagement about international volunteering is creating a double standard that can lead to the volunteering to cause more harm than good.
 

For example: Orphanage volunteering is one of the most popular volunteer travel offerings in part because it fits with both our desire to be heroes and our desire for fun. In Cambodia, orphanage volunteering has become a big business. Interestingly however, while the number of orphans has decreased, the number of orphanages has risen with the rise of volunteer tourism. Unicef estimates that three out of every four children in Cambodian orphanages actually have one or more living parents.
 

The most corrupt orphanage managers even have an incentive to keep the children looking poor, because tourists often want to give their time and money to the poorest looking place, as they think that is where it is needed most.
 

I am sure that there are many positive overseas volunteering schemes and that everyone participating in this type of ‘tourist’volunteering does it for the best of motives.
 

However, using untrained and inexperienced young people to help address complex and sensitive issues, just so they can feel good about themselves, travel and enhance their CVs, is not necessarily the best way to address the issues being faced in poverty stricken areas of the world.
 

Thanks to the bbc web-site.

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