This is going to be a weak pitting, I’ve had quite a few good friends and extended family members go on these and I believe their hearts are in the right place. Still, their delusions have stripped the veneer of civility I once had for this BS and I have to vent to unknown internet people.
I get it, it’s exciting to go to a poverty stricken place unlike anything you had ever experienced and to do this adventure in a secure regulated manner with many people you know takes enough of the scare away to brave it. I understand also that when they go their ‘helping’ build a project their church has funded the construction of for a long time. But that’s the point, a church raises the money from donations to get a high school kid shots and a plane ticket to fly to Haiti for a week to build a church for a few days. So what is that, $400 for the ticket, $100 for the shots, lets make it an additional $100 for amenities and food. All this in a place where the average worker wage is around $5 a day. So by my envelope math the choice is 100 days of work from a man accustomed to the region and experienced in construction or a few days from a sunburned pimple faced postpubescent volunteer.
Peace Corps volunteers pay much of the initial cost out of pocket. They commit to long hours and tours. They get paid but it’s a very small amount. And critically they bring a skill, something in need where they’re going.
I understand it’s lame to chide people helping a little for not helping a lot. I agree it’s better to have these kids get some exposure to Third World nations for the stories they bring home may change the perspective of kith and kin. But when it’s all said and done these trips foster nothing more than fundraising drives to send more kids on these trips to spread their sanctimony which is not as much help as they’d like to believe.
I don’t disagree with your point, OP. You may also know that there are missions with specific goals that are a net benefit to the community being helped.
Example: my sister, an OR nurse, has gone on a couple of missions with other medical people to places in Latin America where the mission group performed operations to repair cleft palates and other reparable birth defects in children and maybe adults. I think they went for 2 weeks and paid for their own room and board, and were paid no salary or other compensation. I’m not sure, but I think they also paid their own airfare. The other money raised for these missions was spent on medical supplies and possibly to some extent on temporary facilities. She said it was thrilling to be able to help in this way, but the trip on the whole was not pleasant and she was always glad to get home.
So while you may well be right about the kinds of missions you are describing, I just want to make sure that you aren’t tarring with too wide a brush.
Yeah, at our weekly status meeting one of my coworkers mentioned that he was going to be going with some organization he didn’t bother to name to Turkey for a couple of weeks to do something volunteerish? He didn’t get specific but he talked far too long about the open culture of hospitality in Turkey. All I could think was, So you’re having a bunch of spaghetti dinners to guilt people to donate so you can fly halfway across the world to drink tea in strange houses and ooh and ahh at their exotic customs? Then what? Shove Jesus in their face? How thoughtful. Lame.
This is great, but what your sister and the other medical personnel have that might be in short supply is the particular skills required for the task.
The problem with a large number of the volunteer opportunities is that they often bring to impoverished or disadvantaged regions the one thing that those regions already have plenty of—cheap, unskilled labor.
So rather than spending (made-up numbers ahead) $1500 to go and dig wells in Kenya, you’d probably do far more good by donating a few hundred bucks towards the cost of a well-digging machine, or the cost of the actual pump to bring the water up.
It does seem somewhat churlish to criticize people who are spending their own money and who clearly want to help, but the fact is that the type of help they want to give is not always the type of help that does the most good.
They don’t pay ‘much of the initial cost’. I don’t think I paid any initial cost, other than some doctor’s appointments for my medical clearance. You get paid enough to live on, and the amount you end up with at the end (readjustment allowance) is probably around what the average person a couple years out of college could have saved over two and a half years anyway.
Of course the money you raise and spend to go on a short term mission/vacation would be more useful to the mission than your manual labor (or english instruction) for a week or a month.
The reason local missions still run programs for these short term missionaries/tourists is because experience invests people over the long term to supporting that mission with money. Also the fee frequently incluldes a donation to the mission. There is nothing like being there and seeing the extreme need first hand.
Groups of short term missionaires frequently bring more than just themselves, sometimes they bring that well digging or water purification equipment or medical supplies or other things but the important things isn’t what they bring with them, its what they take away with them. They leave with a commitment and desire to aiding missions work for the rest of their life.
I don’t think Mitt Romney’s experience as a Mormon missionary is really relevant. As I understand the Mormon missionary experience, it’s basically about seeking converts and not doing volunteer work.
I have a similar problem with feel-good capitalism like the Yoplait yogurt campaign in which they encourage their customers to mail in the foil lids from yogurt containers, in exchange for which the company will donate a million bucks to fighting breast cancer. But they’re spending probably more than a million bucks advertising the send-in-the-lids campaign and the customers are spending time and postage mailing the stupid things in. The company could just make a donation without the accompanying advertising and feel-good customer involvement.
If you’re a doctor, or a nurse, or a dentist, or an engineer, by all means go to a third world country and volunteer.
If you’re a regular guy who won’t be able to do more than unskilled labor, then what’s the point? There are thousands or millions of people in the country who can do unskilled labor. It’s not like they don’t have clean water because they don’t have enough guys with shovels to dig ditches, and they’re just waiting for a white guy who knows how to use a shovel.
I did this when I was a teenager, associated with a church youth group. We went to Tijuana and built pit toilets in a community that lived at the TJ dump. When we returned the next year, the pit toilets we built were padlocked. When we asked why, they said if the residents used them, they would fill up in a matter of weeks. They were reserved for volunteer workers like us. :smack:
Hey, at least the kids are learning something and developing an emotional investment in the project that can translate into ongoing financial investment. My aunt’s church is waaaay worse than that. They’ve got this sewing group, see–people donate fabric and these ladies use it to make all sorts of little things to sell at festivals to raise money. That’s all great, except the money they raise goes to buy fabric to make blankets to send to their mission in South Dakota. And DO NOT ask why they don’t just have people donate the fabric for the blankets. I did that once and got a look that suggested I had two heads, both of them green and with lobsters crawling out of the ears.
And upon reflection, it was a silly question, given what I know of these ladies personally. They’re by and large the sort who wouldn’t give a crippled crab a rubber crutch unless it went to the right church. If they just used the donations for the blankets, they wouldn’t have as much excuse to bustle around making a production out of how busy they are and how much work they put into this blanket project. As it is, they do soooooo much work and raise so much money and that makes them better than the rest of us.
I don’t know these ladies, so I won’t argue with your characterization of them, but is it possible that it’s a lot harder to get people to donate the appropriate fabric for blankets than the bits and pieces they can use for little things? It seems a blanket would take more planning than just a random assortment of fabric scraps?
I don’t see the parallel. Most people who volunteer for Habitat for Humanity work near their own home, and even if they only supply grunt labor, it’s better than paying someone to do that work and thereby raising the cost of the house to more than a poor person can afford.
It’s possible, but seems very unlikely. Most of their items are things like aprons and purses, and the stuff you could make with assorted scraps are always made in one fabric throughout. Apparently, almost all their donations are multi-yard pieces, sometimes entire bolts. It’s not even like they’re needing a different kind of fabric–it’s all quilting cotton and flannel.
Well-run voluntourism generally isn’t really helping anyone, but that doesn’t necessarily make it bad.
I work in the aid industry, and a lot of people who have gone on to do some real good in this world got their first inspiration from a mission trip or volunteer vacation. For many young people (and older people,) this kind of trip can really lead to a shift in thinking and open up a lot of new horizons. I think cultural exchange is generally a good thing for both sides. And while the volunteer aspect is a little bogus, there aren’t many other accessible ways to travel to rural parts of developing countries that lack tourist infrastructure.
With that in mind, sometimes these projects can be very poorly run, and harm the people they are supposed to help. Clueless volunteers dropping into disaster zones and doing whatever are a distraction to real aid agencies and divert resources. Programs that encourage short-term contact with children can lead to emotional trauma and even open up opportunities for abuse. Poorly planned projects (and even well planned ones) can have all kinds of unexpected consequences for a community.
So I encourage the organizations planning these things to adhere to best practices (which are pretty well thought out at this point.) And the people who go on them should have a realistic understanding of what they are getting in to, which means acknowledging that they are going to get more out of it than they are going to give. But viewed as tourism and cultural exchange, I think well-planned projects can have a place in the world.