6 ms·

The help and harm of the “voluntourism” industry

24 points by wormold 11y ago

mattmanser 11y ago
This is a terrible article. It's just someone whining for the sake of it. They can't even find actual harm, the worst they've got is some people don't buy local health insurance because they know volunteer health workers will come in a few months. There's even a bizarrely racist paragrpah where the author bemoans white people helping black people. Because the volunteers can obviously help choose the colour their own skin is... Clickbait.
- DanBC 11y ago
  I'm surprised you have such a strongly negative reaction. "Volunteering holidays can do more harm than good" is not a new concept, and isn't particularly controversial. Floods of rich white low-skilled western volunteers with continual churn are not what is needed in most situations. This is especially true if those volunteers over-estimate their skills and ability to make any real difference. 2010: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/hubs/gapyear/8107555/Volunteer-holidays-do-more-harm-than-good.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/hubs/gapyear/8107555/Volun... 2010: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/nov/14/orphans-cambodia-aids-holidays-madonna http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/nov/14/orphans... 2013: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22294205 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22294205
  - mattmanser 11y ago
    Cherry picking some articles is a waste of both our times. Volunteering isn't all bad, but just like almost anything in the world, there is some bad and obviously where there's money there's going to be corruption. This article has absolutely no facts or even anecdotes to back it up, it's just a big whine designed to appeal to self-righteous suckers who can only see the bad in the world.
- asgard1024 11y ago
  It is always a dilemma if one should criticize efficacy of good intentions. I think at some point it is necessary, even though it may come of as "whining for the sake of it".
- coldtea 11y ago
  >There's even a bizarrely racist paragrpah where the author bemoans white people helping black people. Because the volunteers can obviously help choose the colour their own skin is... This complaint is half-thought. Their color is not just some accident that happened to them at birth. It's what, ever since they were born, defined their place and status in society. A white slave owner in 1840 Mississippi is not just somebody who "couldn't choose the color of his own skin", it's someone who was born into privilege and assumed a role that the society gave to him as a white person. And that's what that part of the article is about.
- veddox 11y ago
  Sorry if I ask the obvious question, but do you have any personal experience with development work/voluntourism? Because if you don't, I think you will find that many people who do would definitely agree with the article. It is a real problem, even if the article itself might perhaps not be an A* essay.
bruceb 11y ago
It is a terrible article because the headline is false. "The voluntourism industry, worth about $173 billion annually" No it isn't. If you click through to the PDF and the source the PDF cites you will find what is actually stated is "global youth travel industry is currently worth USD 173 billion per annum..." Not every young traveler is volunteering.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >It is a terrible article because the headline is false. This is a terrible comment, because it implies that you can judge the whole of an article (which might contain lots of useful information, observations etc) from its headline. Actually, the headline in most news outlets is not even written or chosen by the journalist. Traditionally it's chosen by the editor of the outlet (and it's often made to attract readers).
  - sunir 11y ago
    The headline exists so readers can judge the article before reading it. Complaining about a clickbait headline is fair.
    - coldtea 11y ago
      >Complaining about a clickbait headline is fair. Only when it stops to the headline and doesn't make assumptions about the quality of the article. Please explain in what universe the statement "It is a terrible article because the headline is false" is true.
      - dang 11y ago
        That statement is obviously excessive, but it's helpful to have pointed out that the $173B number is false. I thought when I saw it that it sounded high, but it didn't occur to me to check. We've taken it out of the title. As for titles in general, there's no standing in the way of the dreaded title fever.
csydas 11y ago
Never mind the incorrect term in the second sentence (I'm relatively sure it's language-immersion...I mean, I guess a language emersion course could be described as one that takes you out of your native language, but I've never seen it described that way). Ultimately, the article just misses the forest for the trees with statements like "While the foreign volunteers were well-intentioned, they misplaced their focus; it was necessary to build stable homes, but the real problem was crippling, multigenerational poverty. Lacking skills and employment to improve their condition, Haitian families continued to beg in the streets in the absence of tourists. The volunteers came and left but nothing had really changed." The author is so unaware that they don't seem to realize what they even wrote. The people needed houses and were poor. Are we really supposed to believe that because building houses did not fix both issues that it should not have been done at all?
- veddox 11y ago
  Sometimes working on the wrong problem is worse than working on none at all. Especially if there are limited resources available.
asgard1024 11y ago
I know many libertarians here will not like this comment, and it is slightly OT, but I don't like charity. Charity is like weather, very unreliable and you don't want modern economy rely on it (and often when needed, there is actually too little charity). I think every society needs proper social assistance/redistribution mechanisms; unfortunately, this is difficult (if not impossible) to do without "coercion" (but I don't consider taxes to be a bad thing). In addition, I consider charity to be very condescending. It makes recipient dependent, in terms of power relations, on donor. Many wealthy people use charity to rationalize their empire building, and that's a symptom of this power dynamics. For example, I do find Linus Torvalds lot more charitable than Bill Gates. Gates took money from one group of people (having them buy Windows) and used this power to decide to give it to other group of people based on what he thought is important. Torvalds just left the money on the table, so the society could decide what to do with them. Even though I agree that Gates' choices what to do with money are really good, Torvalds did pretty much the same without the power grab. In other words, we are led to believe that Gates' actions are better just because we can measure them (in terms of money spent), but it's not obvious that is really the case. (Just to quickly clarify - I am not against transfer of consumption pie to people like Gates, I am against transfer of power they have in the society. Money can designate both, unfortunately.) Ultimately, I think charity is just a device for people to believe they are better than they really are. If you absolutely have to do it, do it anonymously without much ceremony, don't rationalize any power grabs with it (for example, don't avoid paying taxes just in order to put the money to charity), and let the recipient decide on their own what they want to do with the money. I guess the disagreements will come down to whether or not you trust the society to do the right thing. But if you don't trust the society, why would you want to be charitable at all? Although this should be read with caution. The above only makes sense in reasonably democratic societies. Then building a charity, with someone's name attached, is a non-transparent power grab from what should be a transparent democratic process. But in undemocratic society, there is really no difference, and it may as well be better for a different wealthy individual to decide. So in a sense the above is a first-world problem; charity is, in my view, simply inferior technology compared to democratic consensus. Finally (libertarians listen!), I think there are technology solutions that could help to avoid relying on government only, but they are not much pursued.
- 11y ago
superplussed 11y ago
It's not a great article, but there are really big problems with "voluntourism". I lived in Nepal for 2 months, and met many "voluntourists". There was actually a strange kind of divide between the voluntourists, who had paid thousands of dollars to be able to teach at a school or work in an orphanage, and the people who found themselves in Nepal for a variety of reasons and wanted to do some good spontaneously. Simply put, the voluntourists didn't want to listen to any evidence that what they were doing was having a net negative effect on the local community. But the problem is that voluntourists create profit opportunities for some really bad people. To put it succinctly, I just found this paragraph leading an article that discusses the problem [1]: [...] volunteers in Nepal may be unknowingly contributing to a growing child trafficking industry that enables fake orphanages to secure revenue from foreigners while deliberately keeping children in destitute conditions. I wanted to do some good while I was there, and met some volunteers of a local school (all of whom had paid to be there), and told them I'd had some ideas about how to teach computer literacy or programming to kids in Nepal. They hooked me up with someone that took me to the school so that I could talk with the principal, etc. What I discovered was a group of people from the principal down to their computer teacher that were openly hostile and disrespectful toward me. This is too long of a story to get into here (maybe I should write a blog post about this), but what I realized later was that the school was a very well-oiled machine when it came to volunteers that were paying the school to teach English. But they didn't really know what to do with this guy that showed up offering to teach about computers, but wasn't paying anything. My takeaway was that the for-profit volunteering industry must be crowding out some well-meaning individuals who don't offer (corrupt) incentives to the local organizations. At least this was my experience in Nepal. [1] https://newmatilda.com/2014/03/04/fake-orphanages-profit-western-volunteers https://newmatilda.com/2014/03/04/fake-orphanages-profit-wes...
- mercer 11y ago
  I've experienced many problems with 'voluntourists' growing up in a developing nation. Well, my parents experienced them, but I observed the difficulties they faced. It happened quite often that a group of volunteers with a sizable budget, but no clue as to what was useful or needed, would swoop in for a month and just work away without consulting any local workers. The result would usually fall apart shortly after they left, with anything of value sucked away by some clever local 'trustee'. However, even more damaging was the fact that 1) the locals involved with the less sexy long-term projects would flock to these new, well-funded project to get some of the 'profit' (for which I don't blame them), and 2) there'd be much grumbling over how our projects weren't as well funded or purely volunteer-based. And then there were also some cases of abuse, or severe culture clashes that would cause other initiatives damage by proxy. My worst experience by far did not involve voluntourists though. The worst involved large aid organizations and peace (corps?) workers swooping in to help with the 'humanitarian crisis'. Warehouses filled with food that destabilized the entire local economy, and a large amount of rather insulting crap (clothing that nobody with any self-respect would wear). Tons of aid workers who didn't even have a basic knowledge of the culture they were in, and no interest whatsoever to consult the people who had been there for years or decades. Sigh. That said, it's not all bad. Quite often some of the 'voluntourists' would fall in love with the country and come back on their own and help out with some of the many wonderful initiatives. I just wish there'd be a little more communication between these short-term (youth) organizations and the 'veterans'. That alone would solve so much. EDIT: One of the worst examples just came to mind. A big organization poured a lot of money into an orphanage for disabled children, but never really bothered to check where the money went since their local 'operations manager' was too busy traveling around the country and pretending to be some kind of saintly figure. Turns out the money went to a single local family that 'helped' said manager by living like royalty and leaving the orphanage a disgusting, heartbreaking mess. It took a lot of extra effort to keep the orphanage in somewhat working state (as understandably many people would refuse to help out, knowing where all the money was going), and it took many, many reports by smaller organizations and independent aid workers before something was finally done.
veddox 11y ago
Like superplussed said, not a great article, but one that raises valid points. Having grown up in the expat community of sub-Saharan Africa and later spent a year working there, I've had my own experiences with these voluntourists and heard plenty of stories from old-timers in the field. Just two of these here: Every few months, colleagues of ours would get a "team" from abroad, sent to them courtesy of their organization. That meant: a dozen young, inexperienced western adults descending on them for two or three weeks to "help out". The first 1 1/2 weeks would be spent doing odd jobs at the orphanage, perhaps putting up a new toilet block or something like that. The next week would be spent on holiday - visiting one of our big national tourist sites. On the face of it, yes, the team did do something useful. But what were the hidden costs? Most importantly, time. The long-term couple that was usually in charge of the orphanage had to devote big chunks of their time per team for planning: planning how to transport the team around, planning how to accommodate the team, planning what to do with the team, etc. Then of course the team needed constant attention and supervision, not to mention accompanying on their tourist trip. All amounting to several weeks of time that could have been spent a lot more profitably. Also, consider the money aspect: each team member probably paid around $2000 - $5000 for the whole trip. What if that money had gone directly to the project? They could have done a lot more than just putting up a new toilet block (which, by the way, could have been done a lot cheaper by local workers, thus also helping the local economy). Apart from this indirect harm caused by voluntourists, there can be direct harm as well. The project I was involved in once had a pretty major staff crisis following some indecent behaviour of a short-term visitor towards a local girl. Said visitor had just come for two weeks to have a look around and help out a little, so we hadn't given him any cultural training (which was an organizational failure, in retrospect). He didn't realize that his behaviour towards the girl, which would have been fine in Europe, was deemed very inappropriate in the local cultural context. The result was, however, that the girl's grandmother, a vital member of our team, felt publicly shamed by her granddaughter's behaviour. (Public shaming is one of the worst things that can happen to an African.) Almost before we realized what was going on, she had sent in her letter of resignation and was packing her bags to leave for her home town. It took a week's patient negotiation by other local staff to get her to stay. So yes, voluntourists can cause a lot of problems, even when their intentions and motivations are impeccable. There is a place for volunteers to serve abroad, but it needs to be done in close communication with the people on the ground who know what is really needed. Plus, if you're thinking in a time span of weeks, that is almost definitely too short a time to do anything meaningful. If you really want to help, come for six months or a year, then we'll talk again.
todd8 11y ago
I traveled to a remote town in Hungary and worked with other Habitat for Humanity volunteers for ten days. I certainly enjoyed the experience, and working with the families that would ultimately end up occupying the homes we were building was a unique and memorable experience. I understand the economic principle of comparative advantage, and I felt like this was economically an inefficient way to provide housing to low income Hungarians. I'm not an experienced carpenter, and I could have easily paid for three real carpenter's to work in Hungary in my place by simply donating the income I would have generated by working at home at my ordinary job rather than traveling to Hungary myself. In a technical sense, I was hurting rather than helping the overall world economy by not doing what I was best at. Knowing all this ahead of time, I was skeptical of this voluntourism trip that a friend of mine had talked me into. Working in Hungary for ten days, with the group of around twenty other people from the USA, gave me time to reflect on my decision to take on the volunteer work. I still believe that it isn't an economically efficient way to build the houses--we were amateur builders. However, what my simple economic thinking about the trip didn't account for was the more emotional impacts that the volunteering had on the participants and beneficiaries. (One of the requirements on the recipients of the homes is that they work on the home being built for them too until it is finished.) The volunteers in the group all seemed to have a very positive experience doing the work. It was satisfying to see the progress we made, it was satisfying to work with a team of interesting people of many different backgrounds, it was fun to take meals together and socialize in the evenings together, and it was heart warming to meet the clearly grateful families that would end up in the houses. These, to some extent narcissistic, rewards seem to be a key factor in the success of Habitat for Humanity: people like doing it and keep going back. I've been dragged to many charity events, dinners, galas, auctions, runs, walks and so forth. I don't really enjoy them, but the experience of working in Hungary despite the commitment of time and expense was something I'm glad I did. Furthermore, there were other important effects. I discovered that at first, when Habitat had first arrived at the town, the people there wondered why the workers from the US couldn't find jobs in their own country; they didn't understand that people would volunteer rather than be paid to build homes. Volunteering to help others apparently wasn't common in this previously communist country. Seeing volunteers working on these homes in these communities led some of the locals to pitch in too. Finally, another benefit was the prolonged exposure to the people in the community. We took swims at lunch time in the very nice community swimming pool which seemed to be the town's main source of day time recreation, and we hung out with the locals in the evening in a local pub that we could walk to. Everywhere we went people were friendly and would make an effort to come up to us and talk. I think it gave us a very positive view of the people of Hungary and them a positive view of us and the United States as well.

24 points by wormold 11y ago

This is a terrible article. It's just someone whining for the sake of it. They can't even find actual harm, the worst they've got is some people don't buy local health insurance because they know volunteer health workers will come in a few months. There's even a bizarrely racist paragrpah where the author bemoans white people helping black people. Because the volunteers can obviously help choose the colour their own skin is... Clickbait.

DanBC 11y ago
I'm surprised you have such a strongly negative reaction. "Volunteering holidays can do more harm than good" is not a new concept, and isn't particularly controversial. Floods of rich white low-skilled western volunteers with continual churn are not what is needed in most situations. This is especially true if those volunteers over-estimate their skills and ability to make any real difference. 2010: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/hubs/gapyear/8107555/Volunteer-holidays-do-more-harm-than-good.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/hubs/gapyear/8107555/Volun... 2010: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/nov/14/orphans-cambodia-aids-holidays-madonna http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/nov/14/orphans... 2013: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22294205 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22294205
- mattmanser 11y ago
  Cherry picking some articles is a waste of both our times. Volunteering isn't all bad, but just like almost anything in the world, there is some bad and obviously where there's money there's going to be corruption. This article has absolutely no facts or even anecdotes to back it up, it's just a big whine designed to appeal to self-righteous suckers who can only see the bad in the world.
asgard1024 11y ago
It is always a dilemma if one should criticize efficacy of good intentions. I think at some point it is necessary, even though it may come of as "whining for the sake of it".
coldtea 11y ago
>There's even a bizarrely racist paragrpah where the author bemoans white people helping black people. Because the volunteers can obviously help choose the colour their own skin is... This complaint is half-thought. Their color is not just some accident that happened to them at birth. It's what, ever since they were born, defined their place and status in society. A white slave owner in 1840 Mississippi is not just somebody who "couldn't choose the color of his own skin", it's someone who was born into privilege and assumed a role that the society gave to him as a white person. And that's what that part of the article is about.
veddox 11y ago
Sorry if I ask the obvious question, but do you have any personal experience with development work/voluntourism? Because if you don't, I think you will find that many people who do would definitely agree with the article. It is a real problem, even if the article itself might perhaps not be an A* essay.

bruceb 11y ago

It is a terrible article because the headline is false. "The voluntourism industry, worth about $173 billion annually" No it isn't. If you click through to the PDF and the source the PDF cites you will find what is actually stated is "global youth travel industry is currently worth USD 173 billion per annum..." Not every young traveler is volunteering.

coldtea 11y ago
>It is a terrible article because the headline is false. This is a terrible comment, because it implies that you can judge the whole of an article (which might contain lots of useful information, observations etc) from its headline. Actually, the headline in most news outlets is not even written or chosen by the journalist. Traditionally it's chosen by the editor of the outlet (and it's often made to attract readers).
- sunir 11y ago
  The headline exists so readers can judge the article before reading it. Complaining about a clickbait headline is fair.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    >Complaining about a clickbait headline is fair. Only when it stops to the headline and doesn't make assumptions about the quality of the article. Please explain in what universe the statement "It is a terrible article because the headline is false" is true.
    - dang 11y ago
      That statement is obviously excessive, but it's helpful to have pointed out that the $173B number is false. I thought when I saw it that it sounded high, but it didn't occur to me to check. We've taken it out of the title. As for titles in general, there's no standing in the way of the dreaded title fever.

csydas 11y ago

Never mind the incorrect term in the second sentence (I'm relatively sure it's language-immersion...I mean, I guess a language emersion course could be described as one that takes you out of your native language, but I've never seen it described that way). Ultimately, the article just misses the forest for the trees with statements like "While the foreign volunteers were well-intentioned, they misplaced their focus; it was necessary to build stable homes, but the real problem was crippling, multigenerational poverty. Lacking skills and employment to improve their condition, Haitian families continued to beg in the streets in the absence of tourists. The volunteers came and left but nothing had really changed." The author is so unaware that they don't seem to realize what they even wrote. The people needed houses and were poor. Are we really supposed to believe that because building houses did not fix both issues that it should not have been done at all?

veddox 11y ago
Sometimes working on the wrong problem is worse than working on none at all. Especially if there are limited resources available.

asgard1024 11y ago

I know many libertarians here will not like this comment, and it is slightly OT, but I don't like charity. Charity is like weather, very unreliable and you don't want modern economy rely on it (and often when needed, there is actually too little charity). I think every society needs proper social assistance/redistribution mechanisms; unfortunately, this is difficult (if not impossible) to do without "coercion" (but I don't consider taxes to be a bad thing). In addition, I consider charity to be very condescending. It makes recipient dependent, in terms of power relations, on donor. Many wealthy people use charity to rationalize their empire building, and that's a symptom of this power dynamics. For example, I do find Linus Torvalds lot more charitable than Bill Gates. Gates took money from one group of people (having them buy Windows) and used this power to decide to give it to other group of people based on what he thought is important. Torvalds just left the money on the table, so the society could decide what to do with them. Even though I agree that Gates' choices what to do with money are really good, Torvalds did pretty much the same without the power grab. In other words, we are led to believe that Gates' actions are better just because we can measure them (in terms of money spent), but it's not obvious that is really the case. (Just to quickly clarify - I am not against transfer of consumption pie to people like Gates, I am against transfer of power they have in the society. Money can designate both, unfortunately.) Ultimately, I think charity is just a device for people to believe they are better than they really are. If you absolutely have to do it, do it anonymously without much ceremony, don't rationalize any power grabs with it (for example, don't avoid paying taxes just in order to put the money to charity), and let the recipient decide on their own what they want to do with the money. I guess the disagreements will come down to whether or not you trust the society to do the right thing. But if you don't trust the society, why would you want to be charitable at all? Although this should be read with caution. The above only makes sense in reasonably democratic societies. Then building a charity, with someone's name attached, is a non-transparent power grab from what should be a transparent democratic process. But in undemocratic society, there is really no difference, and it may as well be better for a different wealthy individual to decide. So in a sense the above is a first-world problem; charity is, in my view, simply inferior technology compared to democratic consensus. Finally (libertarians listen!), I think there are technology solutions that could help to avoid relying on government only, but they are not much pursued.

11y ago

superplussed 11y ago

It's not a great article, but there are really big problems with "voluntourism". I lived in Nepal for 2 months, and met many "voluntourists". There was actually a strange kind of divide between the voluntourists, who had paid thousands of dollars to be able to teach at a school or work in an orphanage, and the people who found themselves in Nepal for a variety of reasons and wanted to do some good spontaneously. Simply put, the voluntourists didn't want to listen to any evidence that what they were doing was having a net negative effect on the local community. But the problem is that voluntourists create profit opportunities for some really bad people. To put it succinctly, I just found this paragraph leading an article that discusses the problem [1]: [...] volunteers in Nepal may be unknowingly contributing to a growing child trafficking industry that enables fake orphanages to secure revenue from foreigners while deliberately keeping children in destitute conditions. I wanted to do some good while I was there, and met some volunteers of a local school (all of whom had paid to be there), and told them I'd had some ideas about how to teach computer literacy or programming to kids in Nepal. They hooked me up with someone that took me to the school so that I could talk with the principal, etc. What I discovered was a group of people from the principal down to their computer teacher that were openly hostile and disrespectful toward me. This is too long of a story to get into here (maybe I should write a blog post about this), but what I realized later was that the school was a very well-oiled machine when it came to volunteers that were paying the school to teach English. But they didn't really know what to do with this guy that showed up offering to teach about computers, but wasn't paying anything. My takeaway was that the for-profit volunteering industry must be crowding out some well-meaning individuals who don't offer (corrupt) incentives to the local organizations. At least this was my experience in Nepal. [1] https://newmatilda.com/2014/03/04/fake-orphanages-profit-western-volunteers https://newmatilda.com/2014/03/04/fake-orphanages-profit-wes...

mercer 11y ago
I've experienced many problems with 'voluntourists' growing up in a developing nation. Well, my parents experienced them, but I observed the difficulties they faced. It happened quite often that a group of volunteers with a sizable budget, but no clue as to what was useful or needed, would swoop in for a month and just work away without consulting any local workers. The result would usually fall apart shortly after they left, with anything of value sucked away by some clever local 'trustee'. However, even more damaging was the fact that 1) the locals involved with the less sexy long-term projects would flock to these new, well-funded project to get some of the 'profit' (for which I don't blame them), and 2) there'd be much grumbling over how our projects weren't as well funded or purely volunteer-based. And then there were also some cases of abuse, or severe culture clashes that would cause other initiatives damage by proxy. My worst experience by far did not involve voluntourists though. The worst involved large aid organizations and peace (corps?) workers swooping in to help with the 'humanitarian crisis'. Warehouses filled with food that destabilized the entire local economy, and a large amount of rather insulting crap (clothing that nobody with any self-respect would wear). Tons of aid workers who didn't even have a basic knowledge of the culture they were in, and no interest whatsoever to consult the people who had been there for years or decades. Sigh. That said, it's not all bad. Quite often some of the 'voluntourists' would fall in love with the country and come back on their own and help out with some of the many wonderful initiatives. I just wish there'd be a little more communication between these short-term (youth) organizations and the 'veterans'. That alone would solve so much. EDIT: One of the worst examples just came to mind. A big organization poured a lot of money into an orphanage for disabled children, but never really bothered to check where the money went since their local 'operations manager' was too busy traveling around the country and pretending to be some kind of saintly figure. Turns out the money went to a single local family that 'helped' said manager by living like royalty and leaving the orphanage a disgusting, heartbreaking mess. It took a lot of extra effort to keep the orphanage in somewhat working state (as understandably many people would refuse to help out, knowing where all the money was going), and it took many, many reports by smaller organizations and independent aid workers before something was finally done.

veddox 11y ago

Like superplussed said, not a great article, but one that raises valid points. Having grown up in the expat community of sub-Saharan Africa and later spent a year working there, I've had my own experiences with these voluntourists and heard plenty of stories from old-timers in the field. Just two of these here: Every few months, colleagues of ours would get a "team" from abroad, sent to them courtesy of their organization. That meant: a dozen young, inexperienced western adults descending on them for two or three weeks to "help out". The first 1 1/2 weeks would be spent doing odd jobs at the orphanage, perhaps putting up a new toilet block or something like that. The next week would be spent on holiday - visiting one of our big national tourist sites. On the face of it, yes, the team did do something useful. But what were the hidden costs? Most importantly, time. The long-term couple that was usually in charge of the orphanage had to devote big chunks of their time per team for planning: planning how to transport the team around, planning how to accommodate the team, planning what to do with the team, etc. Then of course the team needed constant attention and supervision, not to mention accompanying on their tourist trip. All amounting to several weeks of time that could have been spent a lot more profitably. Also, consider the money aspect: each team member probably paid around $2000 - $5000 for the whole trip. What if that money had gone directly to the project? They could have done a lot more than just putting up a new toilet block (which, by the way, could have been done a lot cheaper by local workers, thus also helping the local economy). Apart from this indirect harm caused by voluntourists, there can be direct harm as well. The project I was involved in once had a pretty major staff crisis following some indecent behaviour of a short-term visitor towards a local girl. Said visitor had just come for two weeks to have a look around and help out a little, so we hadn't given him any cultural training (which was an organizational failure, in retrospect). He didn't realize that his behaviour towards the girl, which would have been fine in Europe, was deemed very inappropriate in the local cultural context. The result was, however, that the girl's grandmother, a vital member of our team, felt publicly shamed by her granddaughter's behaviour. (Public shaming is one of the worst things that can happen to an African.) Almost before we realized what was going on, she had sent in her letter of resignation and was packing her bags to leave for her home town. It took a week's patient negotiation by other local staff to get her to stay. So yes, voluntourists can cause a lot of problems, even when their intentions and motivations are impeccable. There is a place for volunteers to serve abroad, but it needs to be done in close communication with the people on the ground who know what is really needed. Plus, if you're thinking in a time span of weeks, that is almost definitely too short a time to do anything meaningful. If you really want to help, come for six months or a year, then we'll talk again.

todd8 11y ago

I traveled to a remote town in Hungary and worked with other Habitat for Humanity volunteers for ten days. I certainly enjoyed the experience, and working with the families that would ultimately end up occupying the homes we were building was a unique and memorable experience. I understand the economic principle of comparative advantage, and I felt like this was economically an inefficient way to provide housing to low income Hungarians. I'm not an experienced carpenter, and I could have easily paid for three real carpenter's to work in Hungary in my place by simply donating the income I would have generated by working at home at my ordinary job rather than traveling to Hungary myself. In a technical sense, I was hurting rather than helping the overall world economy by not doing what I was best at. Knowing all this ahead of time, I was skeptical of this voluntourism trip that a friend of mine had talked me into. Working in Hungary for ten days, with the group of around twenty other people from the USA, gave me time to reflect on my decision to take on the volunteer work. I still believe that it isn't an economically efficient way to build the houses--we were amateur builders. However, what my simple economic thinking about the trip didn't account for was the more emotional impacts that the volunteering had on the participants and beneficiaries. (One of the requirements on the recipients of the homes is that they work on the home being built for them too until it is finished.) The volunteers in the group all seemed to have a very positive experience doing the work. It was satisfying to see the progress we made, it was satisfying to work with a team of interesting people of many different backgrounds, it was fun to take meals together and socialize in the evenings together, and it was heart warming to meet the clearly grateful families that would end up in the houses. These, to some extent narcissistic, rewards seem to be a key factor in the success of Habitat for Humanity: people like doing it and keep going back. I've been dragged to many charity events, dinners, galas, auctions, runs, walks and so forth. I don't really enjoy them, but the experience of working in Hungary despite the commitment of time and expense was something I'm glad I did. Furthermore, there were other important effects. I discovered that at first, when Habitat had first arrived at the town, the people there wondered why the workers from the US couldn't find jobs in their own country; they didn't understand that people would volunteer rather than be paid to build homes. Volunteering to help others apparently wasn't common in this previously communist country. Seeing volunteers working on these homes in these communities led some of the locals to pitch in too. Finally, another benefit was the prolonged exposure to the people in the community. We took swims at lunch time in the very nice community swimming pool which seemed to be the town's main source of day time recreation, and we hung out with the locals in the evening in a local pub that we could walk to. Everywhere we went people were friendly and would make an effort to come up to us and talk. I think it gave us a very positive view of the people of Hungary and them a positive view of us and the United States as well.