My name is Margaret Engel and I’m here to talk about a growing problem among our generation; it’s the type of issue that is unique because it used to be openly accepted and even celebrated by society, but as more ideas are being spread and people are starting to see the consequences of their actions being brought to light, the ethics of it is beginning to be questioned. I’m talking about “voluntourism”, and it’s a topic of great personal importance not only because I want to center my future career around global affairs and impoverished countries, but also because I was once an advocate for it, and I feel that writing this article will help me come to terms with how I feel about it. First and foremost I want to say that I do not condemn volunteer work, and think it is incredibly important in one’s community. However, I think that there are greater, global consequences to Americans traveling to a foreign country for a week or two at a time, hammering some nails in a wall for a few hours a day, and coming home thinking that they had just saved that country from their total demise. There is also a deeper, underlying issue within voluntourism that is the perpetuation of the “white savior complex”, which I will discuss later in this article.
Photo courtesy of Margaret Engel
What is “Voluntourism”?
Voluntourism is a new buzz word to define a mix of volunteer work and tourism, in which a group of Americans or other Westerners (usually high school or college students) will pay a fee to travel to some “developing” country and do some type of volunteer work under a large international organization; the work can range anywhere from constructing houses and schools to light medical work or even educating kids. In the end, the students get to experience a vacation outside of the regular tropical resort with their family and gain a broader understanding of the impoverished world, all the while doing some kind of charity work to help the community that they traveled to. The organizations can be religious, but there are many secular ones, as well. The idea of American kids traveling to a poor country to do productive work for a poverty-stricken community sounds incredibly admirable in theory, and it’s unsurprisingly a booming field; however, the more one reads into the effects of this work and the ethics of it in the first place, one begins to question just how productive this voluntourism industry is. First, I want to share my story.
When I was a senior in high school, I needed to fulfill a certain number of community service hours in order to graduate. Since I had two weeks off for Spring break and still needed a significant amount of hours, my mom offered to sign me up for a service trip to the Dominican Republic, arranged by an undisclosed international service organization. I didn’t know Spanish, I didn’t know anyone else on the trip, and I had never traveled outside of the United States by myself before, but because I am always open to new adventures and definitely needed those service hours, I agreed to go. In truth, I ended up having an amazing time. With the help of twelve other high school students, I built two different houses for poor families, one of which was a single mother with several children. We then painted the walls of a school and got to spend time in one of the villages, where there were dozens of children ready to play with us. The trip opened my eyes to the fact that there was a whole world out there, and there were children my age who were living completely different lives than me, and that the world was an unfair place in which there were global superpowers who used their wealth to ensure that other countries that were plagued by economic sanctions, war, famine, and colonization would never end up on top. That trip sparked my interest in global studies and is the primary reason that I study what I do in school. I will never forget the spiritual development that came with lugging buckets up a giant hill of sand and using a shovel to mix our own cement to build houses that would provide for a family. It was honestly some of the most rewarding work I have ever done.
That being said, it was a few months later that I started to see articles pop up on the Internet talking about the concept of “voluntourism”. I had returned home from the DR with a clean mind and spirit, thinking that I had done incredible work in that community and that I had a newfound motivation to go out in the world and help those in need. But the articles were starting to make me question my work, and I began thinking about the things that I really saw, but maybe did not wish to acknowledge. I recall traveling to one of the poor villages a couple of miles outside of Gaspar Hernandez, and discussing with my group mentor, he mentioned that the reason so many people were outside waiting with huts of jewelry and homemade trinkets for us was because “our groups were their main source of income”. What did that mean for the community? That these naive sixteen and seventeen-year-old kids wanting to get a bracelet for their mothers was the only way a Dominican mother was able to feed her kids that night? Is that not just another form of imperialism, or the neoliberalist mentality of the late twentieth century in which developing countries depended on multinational corporations to employ their community in sweatshops and modern plantations? Some of the articles I read talked about how the service organizations that used their students to build houses, schools, wells, and other projects would end up putting the local builders completely out of work, giving the international companies the profit that would have ended up benefiting the community financially. What is the point in doing all of this work if the community is just going to end up dependent on the groups that do the work? It was a form of imperialism disguised as charity.
The Digital Hero
These are not the only issues with voluntourism. If you have ever gone on Instagram and seen someone perhaps holding the hand of or giving a piggyback ride to some random child from a poor country, you might be familiar with the “white savior complex”. Just type it into Google Images, and you will immediately know what I’m talking about — someone going to a poor country, getting a selfie with a child after having known them for a short and meaningless amount of time, and returning home to take a much-needed nap on their Target couch that was probably manufactured in the country they just came from. It paints this picture in their head that that poor child’s life had somehow been made better by taking a picture with them or playing a game of soccer with them. In reality, there are detrimental consequences to establishing a relationship with someone for five minutes just to leave them and never return, drowning in the satisfaction of doing “good work”. Since I care a lot about this article and wanted to gain more insight about the topic, I sat down with one of my geography professors, Dr. Kari Jensen, who spent many months researching child labor in Bangladesh; although her work there was merely to observe rather than participate, she still had doubts about the ethics of the work, thinking about the white savior complex. She said that when an American child comes to a foreign country and establishes some kind of connection with one or more of the children down there, it psychologically gives the children a glimmer of hope that their life will somehow become better; it also shows them the sheer amount of inequality between the two interacting parties, watching the student pull out a cellphone to take a selfie and then leaving on an expensive flight home to their expensive home and cushy life. The child develops separation anxiety due to this interaction, something that is probably not advertised on a lot of these organizations’ websites.
Again, I do not want to completely disavow the work done by these international companies; their missions are well-intended and I am sure they have opened the eyes of many American students, just as they did mine. However, I think that there definitely needs to be some kind of reform, as the way things are going now these impoverished communities will continue to heavily depend on the work done by these students, perpetuating the hindrance of the country’s autonomy on the global world stage. So then the question becomes, how can these companies change the way they interact with the poor communities in order to create a more productive way of doing humanitarian work, without compromising the students’ exposure to life outside of their home countries? It’s a complicated question, and there isn’t really a clear answer. That being said, I think there are a few things the organizations can do to start the process of de-imperialization.
What Can We Do?
For starters, I believe that a central part of a high schooler’s experience with this work should be education. Something I really appreciated about the company I worked with was that each night, we would have a presentation on the complex history of the Dominican Republic, and what was even more worthwhile was that it was conducted by a Haitian-Dominican, someone who had experienced the effect of colonization first-hand and knew poverty growing up. Learning about these things through the lens of a non-American was incredibly beneficial, and I feel that it should really be ingrained in the minds of these students the real reason they are in those countries in the first place. Something else that could be improved upon is what kind of work is conducted, and how. If the organizations want to come in and build houses for a single mother of several children, why don’t they use the profit they gained from students’ admission and hire the local construction company? They can then volunteer students to learn from the actual builders and help in any way they can. A controversial reform may be to cut off interaction between the children and the high school students entirely. If they are only staying in that community for a week or two at a time, is it worth it for a child to grow closer to one of the students only to watch them leave a few days later and live with that separation anxiety for the rest of their life? I still am unsure about this opinion, but I am open to the idea of limiting the interactions between the students and children of the community. If not that, then perhaps keeping contact between students and the children after the trip is over could somehow be implemented.
These are just a few small ways to start redefining voluntourism to shape it into a productive way for young people to gain a more global insight and find the same spark for humanitarian work that I did, just as long as they ditch the mentality that they are somehow saving the world by painting the wall of a school. I loved going to the Dominican Republic, and I’m not ashamed of the fact that it redefined my own life and how I wanted to live it. I know my professor loved the work she did in Bangladesh, as well. But I think it’s incredibly important to recognize the flaws in this industry and how it’s fostering the white savior complex, neo-imperialism, and painting this picture that humanitarian work from global superpowers is the only way that the Third World has any chance of providing for its people. The real way to start creating equal opportunities for all people in the world is voting for electives who will create real change in the world, and if not that, study hard and get to the point where you can make those changes yourself.
Photo courtesy of Margaret Engel
If you are interested in learning about the effects of voluntourism, check out some more research on the topic:
Volunteer Tourism: A Post-Colonial Approach, Sasha Hanson Pastran
The Harms of Orphanage Voluntourism: Misperceptions among Volunteers, Holly Haverns