STAY HOME, VOLUNTOURISTS! Several years ago, w…
STAY HOME, VOLUNTOURISTS! Several years ago, when I was working as a reporter in Haiti, I came upon a group of Americans, struggling with heavy shovels to stir a pile of cement. They were there to build a school alongside a church. Muscular Haitians stood by watching, perplexed and a bit amused at the sight of men and women who had come all the way from the United States to do a mundane construction job. The Americans were a familiar sight: They were voluntourists. They would come for a week or two for a “project” — a temporary medical clinic, an orphanage visit or a school construction. A 2008 survey of 300 organizations estimated that 1.6 million people volunteer on vacation. Celebrities drop in to meet locals and witness a project that bears their name. Other people come to teach English during school vacations or during a gap year. And some sun-seeking vacationers stay at beachside resorts but also want to see “the real (name your country).” Volunteering seems an admirable way to spend a vacation. We donate money to foreign charities to make the world a better place, so why not also use our skills? However, I wonder if these good intentions are misplaced. The people I watched knew nothing about construction. They had spent thousands of dollars to fly there to do a job that Haitian bricklayers could have done much faster. Imagine how many classrooms could have been built if the volunteers had donated that money instead of flying to Haiti. Those Haitian masons could have found weeks of employment with a decent wage instead of being out of a job — at least for several days. Moreover, constructing a school is relatively easy. Improving education, especially in a place like Haiti, is not. Do volunteer groups have long-term plans to train and recruit qualified teachers to staff the school? Do they have a budget to pay those teachers? Other school-builders I met in Haiti admitted they weren’t involved in any long-term planning. Sometimes, volunteering causes real harm. Research in South Africa has found that “orphan tourism” — where visitors volunteer as caregivers for children whose parents died or can’t support them — has become so popular that some orphanages operate more like businesses than charities, intentionally subjecting children to poor conditions in order to entice unsuspecting volunteers to donate more money. Many “orphans,” it turns out, have living parents who, with a little support, could probably do a better job of raising their children than some volunteer can. Importantly, the constant arrivals and departures of volunteers have been linked to attachment disorders in children. Some volunteers possess specialized skills. In Haiti I met an ophthalmologist from Milwaukee who had just spent a week performing laser eye surgery. He recounted the joy he felt at helping people who were going blind from cataracts to see. But not all voluntourists come with an expertise like ophthalmology. When I asked one volunteer why she moved to Haiti, she said, “I felt called to be here, and came not knowing what I was going to do.” In many ways, this woman is typical; many believe that being a good neighbor in a globalized world means that simply experiencing a foreign culture is not enough. They must change that place for the better. Perhaps we are fooling ourselves. Unsatisfying as it may be, we ought to acknowledge the truth that we, as amateurs, often don’t have much to offer. Perhaps we ought to abandon the assumption that we, simply by being privileged enough to travel the world, are somehow qualified to help. I believe that the first step toward making the world a better place is to simply experience that place. Unless you’re willing to devote your career to studying international affairs and public policy, researching the mistakes that foreign charities have made while acting upon good intentions, and identifying approaches to development that have data and hard evidence behind them — stay home, because voluntourism is not for you.