Why I stopped being a voluntourist

"let's make the move garbage from one trash can to the other all day and if they finish early make them move it back"

Perhaps you were going for humor but locally some (mostly religious) high schools have mandatory required volunteer (LOL) graduation requirements, and criminal court "community service" also means work at the same recycling center, so you end up with a weird and probably very unhealthy mixture of ex-cons and teens at the recycling center basically "doing time" moving stuff from one dumpster to another all day. The weirdest part of the whole situation is its perceived as a social good.

If it was a tech company interviews, they'd grill her for 8 hours about how she would implement a new branch of chlorine halocarbon organic chemistry, invent a P=NP solution to the traveling salesman problem to minimize her drive time, drill her on NMR spectrum analysis even though she'll never use a NMR on the job, sit thru an explanation of how they only want rock stars, and then, if she's a real bro and fits in with the hard partying culture and isn't too old (LOL) then she can get that entry level bench tech job, for a little while, till they run out of money.

> Treating low skill commodity workers as human beings on the same social level as yourself is such a destructive western practice. So is hiring a stranger with a great github rather than your brother in law, hiring a woman if she is the most qualified, etc. Or there is that destructive western practice of managing by output - the boss is working until 8pm but you can go home as soon as you hit your quota.

I really don't know what to say. If it is your assumption that every firm/organization in India follows nepotism and doesn't value true merit, it would be simply a wrong assumption, IMHO. Aren't we all aware as to how Wall Street or any big business in the West hires? cough "Business Networking" cough I guess a good read in this regard would be 'Liar's Poker' or 'The Big Short' by Michael Lewis. [1] There have been corporations(might not be in the truest sense, but a collective of skilled workers with a common directive nonetheless) in India which have achieved amazing feats in the past. One could even say that few of the harmful practices of the West (reckless crony-capitalism for one, or the practice of prioritizing the aim of maximizing shareholders' investment over general public/social responsibility) was an unknown thing but now, it is gaining good traction in India unfortunately. One might find it surprising that India didn't face a subprime/financial crisis when US was neck deep in it. 'Managing by output' isn't really a copyright of the West. In fact, the concept of measuring butt-in-seat time or shifts was totally alien till folks from the West brought it here. (And later pushed further by Adam Smith's Labour theory) Prior to that, it was pure ownership of a task and responsibility. Kautilya's Arthashastra specifically deals with labour theory and even flexi-time to an extent, by taking into account productivity and quality of throughput and not just rote effort/time spent. [1] The skilled artisans/craftsmen never worked by the clock, and thus were able to achieve great things. For them, it was all art. There wasn't even a clear line between art and sciences, but everything was art, including science/maths/engineering.

Off note, I wonder if the mother of that kid that died in Bhopal on that fateful night might have wondered, how the world would have been now if the white man hadn't embarked on the noble enterprise of burdening himself to civilize the non-white people.

Also, am quite sure that the affluent and middle class folks in the West are terribly happy treating low skill commodity workers (who might be immigrants) as human beings on the same social level as themselves.

I really would want to write a long post. Will certainly do so once time permits.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar%27s_Poker / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Short [2] http://userwww.sfsu.edu/mbar/ECON605/Arthashastra.pdf

"we understand the incredibly complex social, economic, political, and cultural dynamics of countries better than they know themselves."

Yeah, that's exactly what the qualified ones do. Exactly why we send them. But there are not enough qualified volunteers.

The problem with the Peace Corps, from discussion with my cousin who did his tour in Africa in the 80s and scared me out of even considering it myself, is the PHBs say they only send over qualified volunteers but fundamentally, "we need one thousand warm bodies" so they have a ranked list where he came in very near the top with a recent degree in agronomy and unfortunately somewhere between near the top, and warm body 1000, it drops into the article description of "unskilled inexperienced untrained barely educated laborer white girl or boy". They really needed 1000 agronomists and livestock qualified veterinarians and technician level workers, but what they got was like 100 regional teams of ten or so where on average about one guy per local group had any real idea what he was doing. You're going over there to help modernize farming out of the ancient era and you have no idea what soil chemistry is... well, I guess you get to hold the shovel, not much else you can do while I run this soil analysis. Another problem is it dilutes the brand so to speak of the work they do... there really are useful volunteers, just the ratio of useful/useless depends strongly on who volunteered that year and the demand and a variety of political concerns. Finally he spent most of his time basically managing at a distance and without any official authority his unskilled fellow americans as they attempted to do a highly skilled and technical job, so the locals didn't even get any direct benefit from his work (although via levels of indirection he did benefit them). One interesting perspective is that our world wide logistical distribution system can, in the absence of warfare, quite easily provide people in the middle of nowhere with enough rope to hang themselves, along the lines of just because you can now purchase a certain seed doesn't mean it'll grow, or if one unit of chemicals improves yield 50%, you'd be amazed how many otherwise logical humans will want to try a hundred units of the same chemical, what could possibly go wrong? Not to mention intelligent use of modern tools, finally having the technology to wash all your topsoil downriver doesn't mean its a great idea to do so, trying to make the desert bloom is a fools errand, etc, but I digress.

Now it would not surprise me if there's at least four perspectives opposed to each other, that being what they claim to do, what they actually did in the 80s, what they do now, and my cousin's story. But he did tell a compelling and believable story at the time, as I recall it and there might be some insight in it anyway.