Why I stopped being a voluntourist

I have seen, heard of and have been invited to participate in these trips. Some are NGOs, some are religious groups.

Yeah, looking at it from the perspective she wrote, it seems ridiculous. It is an "industry", wrapped in a non-profit, save-the-world PR shroud, that caters to educated, Westerners who can afford to travel overseas. People feel good when they do good. Whether they other side perceives it as good, sometimes it is not clear.

One can ask, is it better if these "unskilled" people never left home? Maybe even with all the seeming waste and incompetence, it keeps people engaged. I suspect most of them would not have just taken the money for that plane ticket, and handed that check to a NGO that knows better how to spend it, and could build 10 libraries for all that money. But I am afraid it is either "send the volunteers and keep them engaged somehow" vs "don't send the volunteers at all and say goodbye to that money and resources".

People like to help others, people like to tell stories, like to have adventures. These trips cater to that aspect. Do people in Africa feel better knowing that foreigners want to come in and at least try to slap a brick on top of another even if they don't know how? I see a lot of criticism of this here, and rationally I agree, but I also feel there is a bit more too it and I personally am on the fence whether this is good thing or not.

The main point the article is making, that not all volunteers are providing a net positive, is an interesting one.

I have a problem with her position, though. She ends the article with: "Be smart about traveling and strive to be informed and culturally aware. It’s only through an understanding of the problems communities are facing, and the continued development of skills within that community, that long-term solutions will be created."

The problem is that it's hard to be culturally aware and to understand the problems communities are facing if you aren't exposing yourself first hand to those communities. I imagine quite a many useful volunteers, the author included, started off as "voluntourists". And perhaps therein lies the greatest strength of these programs - they help expose little white girls (and boys) to other cultures and problems they otherwise would be unaware of and some percentage of those move on to more useful volunteering.

If she is going to advocate the position she's taken, then she could at least end the article with some alternatives for would be volunteers. As is, if anything, she's just alleviating some of the guilt people might feel over not volunteering: "By volunteering I would be causing more harm than good, so the right thing to do is nothing."

> The problem is that it's hard to be culturally aware and to understand the problems communities are facing if you aren't exposing yourself first hand to those communities.

Absolutely, and on top of this it takes a while to learn that stuff in an ongoing process, and definitely isn't easy -- you aren't going to learn it in a week's exposure.

So that means if one wants to help by 'going there', one should be prepared to make a lengthy and long-term commitment to be there. Likely years. (If not necessarily consecutively).

Because for a while you won't be helpful, and it'll take time to increase your helpfulness, as you figure shit out. Be prepared to persist through some of the time will be really challenging.

If someone is not ready for that, then maybe 'going there' isn't the right role for them. There are plenty more roles one can take to help, many involving raising/giving money, but also educating oneself and one's neighbors, and other work one can do from one's own location.

If someone can't see beyond 'going there' or 'nothing', that's their problem to overcome or be helped to overcome, but it doesn't make it true that 'anything is better than nothing' -- it can be really hard to avoid being useless or harmful in culturally unfamiliar contexts.

This is a good point. Someone doing mostly-not-effective volunteering isn't there 99% of the time. But that's kind of the point -- they've made a connection and now care about the project. That's got to have ongoing value in terms of things that'll be more helpful (either valuable help or money). Perhaps even sufficient for people who are there 99% of the time to re-lay some brick and call it even.

Living in Indonesia for two years has changed my perspective quite a bit. One of the big things about American culture I now regard as totally odious is the idea that everyone wants to be like us and therefore if we remake the world in our image we are doing everyone a favor. Most of the world doesn't want to be exactly like us -- they like some things about us and dislike other things, and what we like about ourselves may not bear any relation to that.

Societies are homeostatic, equilibrium-seeking systems. If they weren't they'd fall apart under the sorts of stresses that life places on us wherever we live. Foreigners coming in to believe they are making a difference inevitably solve the wrong problems and likely solve them badly.

Now, my parents took some boarding school students to help build medical clinics (under the direction of "Where there Is No Doctor" author David Werner) in the mountains of Mexico back before I was born. They were providing unskilled labor in an area that really did have a shortage (because most people were working in the farms). The upshot though wasn't that the clinics got built faster (they might not have) but that my father got interested in medicine and changed careers from being a math teacher to being a doctor. I have never heard my parents talk about what a difference the students made, or even so much about whatever difference they made.

But having talked with David about this he told me about some of his failures, about how they had this big anti-folk-medicine campaign that they hoped would reduce infant mortality due to diarrhea but then when the floods came, people wouldn't use their folk medicine anymore and the mortality rates went up instead of down and he said they had to go back and reposition what they were offering as one remedy among many.

Often we forget that the people closest to a problem are the best prepared to solve it, and we forget to trust them on this. It is far too often the case that the do-gooders and the activists who haven't yet learned this lesson, solve the wrong problems, often badly, and make things worse.