A friend just sent me an interesting email about the voluntourism article.
The problem I have with young people getting heavily involved in humanitarian work isn’t just around lack of skills, knowledge (and therefore the potential to mess up) - it’s also around their own mental health. At [an Australian community NGO] we have had so many people leave incredibly hurt and broken…part of this is due to the institutional politics of the place, but it’s also been because often, people have become residents (they live in the building and as a result end up with primary responsibility for dealing with ODs etc) when they were going through significant personal change - working through various issues around identity, beliefs, values etc. These are big issues, and then they come into [the organisation] and all their questions are magnified, and on top of that they have to deal with some really confronting issues around drugs, homelessness yadda yadda…all at the ripe old age of 21 or 22. In the last few years we have, quite by accident, had mostly 24-27 year olds coming in, and the difference has been amazing…people sort through a huge amount of stuff in those extra few years. I don’t want to dismiss the capacities of young people, but I also think we need to find a balance between recognising their capacities and recognising that in our society, 21 ain’t that old!
1. Everything is spelled phonetically, so once you know the rules it’s virtually impossible to mispronounce a word.
2. The regional slang is brilliant. I suppose it’s the same with English, but I don’t notice it in my mother tongue. My absolute favourite word is the Chilean word for ‘mullet’ (the hairstyle): chocopanda. Chocopanda!
3. The word love, amor, is stronger than the English equivalent. We use it all the time, for everything: I love icecream, I love my cat, I love this song. In Spanish, amor is only used between people deeply in love.
Querer is used in many situations where we’d say love. It means to want, to like a lot, to care for. You can use it with friends or lovers. It’s kind of in between liking someone as a friend and feeling romantic love, and gives you the option of telling someone you like them a lot without having to pull out the L word.
Yet another, gustar, expresses that something is pleasing. Instead of the action being on you, “I like it”, it’s the thing that acts: “it pleases me.”
You know the story about Eskimoes and their many words for snow? What I love (heh) most about Spanish is that they need so many for expressions of caring and devotion. Says something about a culture, I think.
I think I’ve found an NGO with which to spend some time while I’m in Cuerna. It’s a sort of coordinating body for local indigenous and cultural organisations, and they need some assistance with evaluating their activities and planning for the future.
It looks like a good opportunity for me to share some of my skills in project implemetation and evaluation and at the same time widen my experience. I’m just a little concerned that after my 8am-2pm classes I’ll be of little use to them!
(it is a little strange to be posting about volunteer work overseas directly above the voluntourism comments, isn’t it?)
Gap year students who take their skills to developing nations may be doing more harm than good, a volunteer organisation said yesterday. A Voluntary Service Overseas spokesman said many “year out” programmes were no more than a form of new colonialism in which rich westerners indulged in a form of “charity tourism”. Not only are the trips the source of dinner party stories of questionable interest, they could actually leave their destinations in a worse state than before they arrived.
I am so glad that the dodgy side of ‘voluntourism’ is being reported in the media. I commend anyone for wanting to do good works, but ‘gap yearers’ deserve better information about the impacts these projects have on communities in the developing world and how much of their cash goes into company directors’ pockets.
Unskilled volunteers often cost organisations more than they benefit them. Volunteers must be supervised, trained, and younger ones especially require a high level of care and guidance. Paying a fee to cover the cost of hosting a volunteer for a short period makes sense, and is ethical; shelling out the equivalent of a local worker’s yearly salary for a two month stint to boost your cv is not. The truth is that a donation of money or goods will most likely have a greater effect than the labours of an Australian (or British, or US) teenager.
Aside from these organisations’ abhorrent waste of resources and financial exploitation of communities in need, what I find most disturbing about the voluntourism trend is that it reinforces (or creates) a perception that foreigners from rich countries are more valuable than local people, or that communities in developing countries do not need or deserve the same standards of work and education. As a VSO spokesperson said in the article linked above:
We would not expect young untrained people to come here and teach our children. So why do we send untrained people to other countries to teach English? Volunteers need to question whether what they are doing is of any use to the country they are travelling to.
I don’t mean to come down hard on people who take part in these programs. I am a great proponent of the benefits of travel, and I believe that exploring other countries and cultures can give young people excellent opportunities to learn and develop cross-cultural undertanding. But these programs? Not the best way to help developing countries. When people ask me about short term, unskilled volunteer placements, I tell them to enjoy a holiday or study abroad for a semester in a developing country, get to tknow the language, people, customs and culture, and seek out local organisations that could use a donation.
