I’ve no problem with it if they’re willing to pay for it themselves. It does get on my craw a bit when someone wants to bag my groceries for a donation so their kid can faff about in Kenya for 3 months.
Ravenman has it right. Volunteer vacations are an alternative to traditional tourism, not an alternative to giving to a well-researched charity.
As an alternative to traditional tourism, it can be a really smart choice for some regions. Much of Africa doesn’t have a well-established travel trail, and independent travel can be challenging once you get out of the more developed cities. For a young tourist, the most accessible way to travel is going to be some kind of organized group tour. From what I know, these tours can be pretty dreadful (especially on the low end). You spend many of your daylight hours on the road in a huge vehicle, and spend the nights in backpacker hostels packed with foreigners. Your only contact with local culture may be hotel staff, kids asking for presents, and men trying to sell you stuff.
Volunteer vacations, on the other hand, give you the opportunity to meet a variety of people, learn more about home and public life for ordinary families, and maybe participate in some cultural events that you probably wouldn’t find on your own. Again, in Paris you can soak in the culture walking around, going to a concert or an opera, eating at a local cafe and going to a museum. In Lusaka, walking around can be pretty intimidating, you aren’t going to have many resources publicizing cultural events (though they do happen), local restaurants and bars can be hidden away and the Zambian national museum is a fun place, but more as a bizarre sideshow than a serious museum (Do check out the extensive witchcraft section if you are ever there!) Lusaka has some cool stuff and is worth travelling to, but traditional tourists might miss the vast majority of it and end up seeing nothing but another dirty, chaotic African capital. Volunteer vacations can offer a deeper look and some more engagement in the place you are travelling to.
None of us are going to tackle world poverty with our vacation fund, and once you start playing the “People are starving and I’m rich” game, you’ll end up thinking yourself in circles until nothing makes sense. Extreme poverty is a complex interaction of political and economic systems, not just a lack of money. Plenty of organizations, often funded through government funds, are working to reimagine these systems in a way that entire countries don’t starve. This proccess takes massive amounts of money and political will, and isn’t really something your vacation is going to sway one way or another. Individuals can have a real impact, but it takes a sustained committement that not everyone is able to make. But that doesn’t stop us from doing little things that make the world a better place, even if in the grand scheme of things it’s not a perfect utilization of resources. Nobody is giving all that they cosmically could.
IMHO, the best thing anyone can do to alleviate poverty in Africa is go over and start a business, or patronize local businesses. I’m sure that these vacations have inspired some people to do just that, have helped keep the local businesses around the tourist trade open, and have made at least a few people more open to the idea of investing in Africa now that they know it’s not just war and starvation.
while that has already been addressed and agreed to, where did this get introduced into the debate? the Op was about someone asking for money to fund their trip because it was super helpful for the africans vs contemplation of how to better spend that money if help is the end goal.
you might as well say voluntourism is a fantastic alternative to smoking meth. it’s arbitrary. she didn’t have some vacation fund she could spend on anything in world she wanted or any place she wanted to go. she is asking people, and leads with “i am going to africa to help people,” ending with “give me some money to go help africans.”
i will say again: that was the initial debate; the cost-to-help ratio, not a crap shoot to find any value in it at all.
Nobody is under the illusion that the cost-per-benefit ration of volunteer tourism is anywhere near what it’d be donating to a well-run development organization or charity. You have a straw man here. Everyone- the participants, the organizers, the local partners, etc.- are well aware that volunteer tourism is not actually a development strategy. Your friend, for example, had a pretty realistic idea of what she was doing.
That doesn’t mean it can’t be a good thing, for all the reasons we’ve discussed. It can be a win-win situation.
If you don’t want to donate, I don’t think anyone is going to fault you for politely turning her down. But it’s not uncommon for people to fundraise for enrichment activities that are primarily recreations- from the little league bake sale to the breast cancer walk-a-thon or the charity gala. For a high school or young college student, even the fundraising itself can be a valuable learning experience, and a lot of organizations encourage fundraising (rather than paying out of pocket) because it represents a commitment larger than cutting a check and teaches networking and organizational skills that will be valuable in the future. And the fundraising itself can be fun- partnerships with restaurants are pretty popular among students at my university, and it’s a good excuse to get out and have dinner with your friends.
And hey, if you do happen to have cash in your pocket, there are worse ways to spend a few bucks than helping someone you know and like have a life-changing experience. I just dropped a ten bucks on a friend’s charity marathon because it’s an easy way to lend support to a friend who is doing something really cool (running a marathon!), it’s a good cause, and it’s tax deductible (and the overpriced fancy drink I would have probably spent that ten bucks on are not). It doesn’t really hurt me, it helps someone I know and it helps a good organization, so why not?
And for the people who don’t travel to do drugs and have sex with prostitutes…?
Getting prostitutes off drugs.
Well, I’d suppose they’d just continue to settle for a purely local outlet for all their drug/whoring/debauchery needs.
this is patently untrue. were that the case, this thread wouldn’t exist.
this was addressed in post 15424964 (#16 of the thread. please take a second to read it).
the volunteers i have spoken with other than rachael insist they are going to make a difference, that africa needs or needed them and they feel compelled to comply. not a single person other than rachael has been pragmatic about their role or reasons.
having grown up involved in protestant ministry, i have been exposed to a great multitude of projects, programs and volunteerism. i have talked about these things with these people. the answer has always been they are going to help, because they feel like they can really make a difference and so on and so forth. and even in the case of my current friend on the subject, she hadn’t contemplated the amount of money she was spending vs the yearly income of the people she was intending to help. it is why she became so upset, and i spend a half hour trying to make her feel better about her intentions. so–absolutely not–many, many people are under the illusion the cost is nothing compared to the benefit. i cannot emphasize enough that if the majority of people had a practical mentality about their impact vs the cost, i wouldn’t have been ruminating on the topic to begin with.
I remember going down to the red cross site after 9/11 site with a few friends (all corporate attorneys) and insisting that we can help. They told us that the best thing we could do was donate money to the Red Cross but eventually they let us fold children’s clothing that was donated by some church. They packed the clothes back on the container and sent it to some storage facility far far away from the 9/11 site (where apparently there wasn’t much need for gently used children’s clothing). While we were there, another guy showed up and insisted that he could help with the Red Cross efforts and eventually, they had him testing the caps on water bottles to make sure they hadn’t been opened. After an hour of carefully testing water bottles to see if the safety seal had been broken, he wrote them a check and left. We followed suit.
Then when I got back to the office, there was a line at a red cross blood bank where there was a line of blood donors going around the block TWICE. Eventually they came out and told everyone with positive blood types other than AB+ to get off the line, they were running out of room at the bloodbank.
It may not be emotionally satisfying but what Africa needs to get may not be what we need to give. There was a thread a while aback about how we can fix Africa and I don’t recall sending recent college grads for a few weeks at a time being high on the list of solutions.
Aha. Young, devout, true believin’ young adults-- particularly in some of the more enthusiastic strains of Christianity-- are not well known for holding nuanced, complex, reality-grounded points of view. It can be a short step from “Jesus was God’s gift to the world” to “I must be God’s gift to Africa.” Religious perspectives can sometimes encourage missionary “I’m here to save you” thinking, black and white solutions, and otherwise questionable motivations. Spending time in developing countries eventually makes everyone pretty cynical, but I think the deeply religious can hold on to their naivety longer, since they have a lot ideas in their head that aren’t about actual right-now concrete reality. If you know on faith that Jesus wants you to do things this way, it’s going to take a while to make sense of the fact that that might not actually be 100% true.
I know a lot of religious people who do amazing development work, and some of the most effective aid organizations have a strong faith component, but I think it takes an exceptionally mature and nuanced understanding of your faith to do it well. Mature and nuanced understanding of faith is a pretty rare find in the kind of youth group member who is into it enough to be so actively involved.
Very interesting site. I just spent some hours following a lot of links and reading a number of articles about aid and volunteers and donors…I even ended up donating to maintain the site, something I very rarely do.
Thanks for the link.
couldn’t agree more. but like the linked article above me discusses, good intentions sometimes aren’t enough–and often can do harm.
it’s hard to be critical of someone over their good intentions, but in terms of practicality, i can’t help really keep myself from considering all the options.
and btw, thank you for other post–the part about “if you have it to donate, there certainly are worse things you could donate towards.” i wanted to post that in rebuttal to my own thoughts, but i was already called out for debating myself, so i was waiting for someone else to make that point. 
You can’t really make it as issue of expense. From what I understand, no tourists are getting paid to go to Africa - instead they’re paying to go there for these projects. So the expense is being born by the participant and it’s a free gain for Africa. From the point of view of the project, they’re better off having some tourist pay five thousand dollars to come work for “free” than paying a local fifty dollars to do the same work.
Sucks to be that local guy who lost the fifty dollars. But he and his community gained from the project itself.
If you put it in terms of paying five thousand dollars to fly to Africa as a volunteer worker vs staying home and sending Africa the five thousand dollars, it’s hard to argue that you get more benefit out of sending the money rather than yourself. But that’s not the only way to look at it. If you put it in terms of paying five thousand dollars to fly to Africa as a volunteer worker vs paying five thousand dollars to go to Hawaii and lie on a beach for two weeks, then you’re doing more good by going to Africa.
Well…the site linked to above precisely points at examples of “voluntourism” being a net negative for the community you’re supposed to help.
I don’t see that. The article seemed to support the points I made. The money certainly could be spent better but there’s not any net negatives.
For example, was spending $200 on paint for a school better than spending $200 on educational supplies? That’s doubtful. But was spending $200 on paint better than spending nothing? Yes. Paint may have been a poor use of the money but it wasn’t a negative use.
The other examples given in the article seem to be similar. The author is arguing that things could be done much better. I don’t doubt that. But are these better alternatives on the table? If the choice is between doing good and doing great, pick great. But if the choice is between doing good and doing nothing, pick good.
Let me say this as clearly as I can: oops. I misread the statement which I was responding to: somehow, while reading your post on my iPhone, the “billion people starving to death” and the “people living on $1 a day” were conflated in my mind. You wrote your point clearly, I simply misread it as a billion people starving every day, which is obviously wrong. I regret my error.
You said a LOT of things in your OP. Including, “what is the point of suburban white college kids volunteering to go to africa to “help them?”” and “what POSSIBLE benefit could said kids provide by physically being in the country–especially when the cost-to-benefit ratio factors in the overwhelming aspect that a single plane ticket to africa from NY would cost at least-if-not-much-much-more than an average african’s entire year’s income.” Neither one of those statements seem to have anything to do with being asked to fund someone’s trip, which you are now saying is the “entire point” of the debate.
I’m responding to your points about it being a waste of time and money for people to go to Africa. Your annoyance at someone asking you to help them go to Africa isn’t much of a debate. In the future, perhaps you could be clear what you want to debate: is it people asking for money to go to Africa? (If so, then you’re under no obligation to contribute to their cause. Debate over.) Is it people going to Africa on their own dime and whether that’s a useful endeavor? (A more interesting question.) But it’s a bit of a poor showing to have a poorly written OP and then accuse people of misunderstanding it.
Again, what are we debating? Your OP talks about people going to Africa and questions whether it is worth it. 2/3rd of the way through your post there is one mention of a friend asking for money so they can go to Africa. Your second and third posts make no mentions of begging for money, which implies to me that you simply think voluntourism is a waste no matter who pays for it… But you say several times that you have no problem if people choose to spend their own money to do this kind of thing.
So, which is it? Do you want to debate whether voluntourism is always a waste of money no matter who pays for it? Or would you like to talk about how annoying and useless it is to be asked to donate for someone else’s vacation?
truncating as reply to whole post.
the genesis was this: i have the friend about to go, who is spamming facebook and such asking for money. that got me to thinking about this sort of thing a little more than i had in the past. by “this thing,” i mean the efficacy of third world volunteerism in ratio to the cost, and the cost in ratio to the cash value of travel vs the same cash value directly input into the life of the needy.
as stated, i have been exposed to various volunteer groups and individuals all my life, through religious organizations, colleges, and corporate entities. until my convo w rachael (the girl about to embark), not a single person has ever doubted or even considered their actual ability to make a difference.
and frankly, until the night i posted this, i hadn’t ever considered it either. i just kind of thought the same thing everyone thinks: “wow, you’re going to africa to help in some way. that’s a really good thing to do. you’re a good person doing a good thing.” but for the first time, after the bombardment of fundraising–which let’s face it, inflicts a marked amount of guilt upon everyone they ask for money–i started to really consider the entire broadview of this process.
i had a talk with a friend who is way smarter than me, and the immediate answer was “it’s not for the africans. it’s for the volunteer. if they really wanted to honestly help, they should change their ticket to a one-way FROM africa and bring someone here.”
i started looking into volunteer programs and looking at different groups. nearly all the photos are of white people doing manual labor, in what appeared (and subsequently are confirmed to mostly be) one-off projects designed so volunteers have a thing to go do so they feel like they helped. “i dug a well in africa! i helped!”
so, while i might have said an awful lot and convoluted my concept (hint: i am verbose), my logical concept was “helping africans is the stated goal. is this really the best way to help them? because it seems a little self serving.”
it’s a very difficult thing to criticize–someone’s good intentions. nearly all these people have an inflated sense of their good deed and the value they provide. and they are coming from a point of good-hearted humanitarianism, and i believe this is why most people never give it a second thought. someone says they need money to go help in africa, you open your pocketbook. you feel a little guilty they are being such a great person, feel a little bad about yourself and off-set that guilt by donating to their cause.
i really don’t think people consider it much beyond that. and i admit i never really had, either, up til the point of posting this thread.
but really removing the guilt and bleeding heart aspects, it’s very easy to see some really glaring flaws in this process.
i googled around things like “is volunteering in africa really altruistic” or “who benefits from volunteerism” and things of that nature, looking for some articles or anything pertaining to some level of criticism of the process, and i found none. coupled with the attitude of everyone i’ve dealt with, i really wondered if anyone else was critical of this process.
so i posted here.
So… is the “entire point” of this thread about your friend begging for money to go to Africa, as you said in post 20? 
I was thinking of examples like staying in the hotel owned by a notoriously corrupt politician, wasting the time of actual aid workers, spreading distrust and jealousy by offering goats or educational supplies to corrupt locals/ arbitrarily selected families, making people wait in a camp rather than going to work because they might miss the random hand out of a very significant (for the locals) amount of money (this example appeared in another article).
I admit that I don’t think it’s generally the case. I just wanted to point out to the opinion expressed by the author. Just food for thought.
Yes. It’s been quite obvious since the beginning that the OP wants to restrict the discussion to his very specific issue.
He should have posted this thread in IMHO rather than in GD, I believe.
from the op:
so yeah. post 1, 16, 20, and many others. sorry you missed it the first (many) times i said it.