As I was recently filling out the volunteer experience portion of my graduate school applications, I couldn’t help but feel that I somehow hadn’t done enough.
Although I’ve had many wonderful service experiences and was eager to describe their importance to me on my applications, I suddenly felt remorseful for having not volunteered in more countries, built a water collecting duct or spent any time in Asia.
But while experiences like these may be life-changing for me and other volunteers, I quickly reminded myself that they’re hardly beneficial for anyone else.
In fact, voluntourism—a form of tourism in which travelers participate in volunteer work—harms native citizens of developing nations and prevents these countries from addressing long-term problems because they focus solely on short-term solutions.
Orphanages, for instance, are one of the largest voluntourism traps.
On the outset, volunteering at an orphanage seems like an ideal way to help children and have consistent, first-hand interactions with the local population.
However, volunteering at orphanages creates an industry that allows these organizations to operate like a for-profit business.
J.K. Rowling, founder of Lumos, a non-profit that provides children who live in orphanages with the right to return to their families, highlighted the problem of voluntourism at orphanages in a series of tweets last year.
“I will never retweet appeals that treat poor children as opportunities to enhance Westerners’ CVs,” the author tweeted.
Because there’s a consistently steady stream of Westerners looking to work at orphanages, for nothing more than a line on a resume, orphanages end up exploiting the situation of these children to appease volunteers.
According to Lumos, 90 percent of children in orphanages have their own families. But voluntourism encourages these children to latch onto total strangers as part of the experience.
The CEO of Voluntary Services Overseas told The Independent that voluntourism can have a negative impact on institutionalized children, which is why the organization refuses to support these kinds of volunteers.
Outside of orphanages, voluntourism can often prevent a developing nation from developing its own resources.
Plans to build schools or complete lofty construction projects require dedicated hard work, but they usually fail to address the area’s long-term problems.
In Port au Prince, Haiti, missionaries have built dozens of schools.
However, there are no long term plans to pay teachers or even acquire teachers, according to the New York Times.
Projects like these address the fact that there are a limited number of schools for the city’s residents, but they don’t acknowledge the lack of educational resources in the region.
The right kind of volunteering is a great, healthy and beneficial experience for both parties.
However, voluntourism creates an environment that perpetuates the institutionalization of poverty and fails to address underlying structural problems within a region.
Acts of voluntourism are not viable solutions.
If we’re going to spend thousands of dollars volunteering, our money should be spent on actions that will produce long-lasting results and will actually help the people we’re trying to serve.
npatwari@indiana.edu
