95. Volunteer Tourism

Today we’re going to be talking about volunteer tourism, you might also hear it called voluntourism. So what is it? And should we do it?

Volunteer tourism is where you go on a trip, usually this is talked about within the context of Americans flying to other countries, usually to developing countries, and you volunteer.

Maybe you’ll be helping to build a school or something like that.
Generally, a key attribute of volunteer tourism is that you’re doing something that you don’t actually have skills in. LOL. And before you think I’m dragging you, I’m dragging myself too, OK?

I went on a couple of trips where I traveled to another country and volunteered on a construction team that was building a house for a family.

I am not a construction worker, I was a young, healthy, and fit person, but I absolutely did not have construction skills, none of us did. We were a group of maybe let’s say 10 American young professionals. I can’t remember the exact number. We all had office jobs. Marketing, engineering, HR. I remember that there were 2 or 3 actual construction workers, local guys, that were assigned to show us what to do that week. My favorite task was mixing the concrete, so that’s what I did most days. Mix concrete with a shovel. One of the guys really liked learning how to lay brick and so that was his task. Obviously our work did not look as good as what the actual construction workers could do and we were much much much much slower.

But we felt good about what we were doing. We were practicing a foreign language and we were quote unquote helping out. Of course, a part of the volunteer trip was making a sizeable donation to the project and that felt great too. It felt great to buy the materials needed to build this family’s house.

But as I’ve looked back on that experience, I’ve really interrogated it. Obviously if the point was to help the family build a house, the most efficient way to do it would have been to send the money we were going to spend on airfare and hostels and just send it to the organization to build the house. I am a lifelong renter, but I can’t imagine living in a house built by volunteers, even if they were supervised by someone who actually knew what they were doing. I don’t think i would even feel safe in a house built by unskilled volunteers.

I also think about what it must have been like for those construction workers to supervise us that week. I remember one day on the worksite, I was asked to pause on mixing the concrete with the shovel and it was all hands on deck, all of us volunteers had to move that big pile of bricks from over there to over there. And so there was some debate among us on the most efficient way to do that and we decided on an assembly line where we handed the bricks from person to person down a line of people until we moved the whole pile. And the next morning, I remember that the pile was in a different place, apparently the actual construction workers had moved it overnight. Maybe they even had a machine to do it, I’m not sure.

Thinking about it years later, I kinda think they might have been giving us busy work. To keep us occupied. Like when you’re cooking with a child and you give them a task that makes them feel like they’re helping, but is actually just stirring a bowl of salt.
I think we were doing busy work. I wonder if the construction workers tore down our work and redid it properly over night or after we flew back to the US.

This is my biggest concern about volunteer tourism. Do we have the skills that we are volunteering? Are there locals who are skilled in that area? Or who can become skilled in that area?

I think there is some types of overseas volunteering that can make sense, in some contexts. For example, maybe you have a very specific and rare skill that is not accessible in that country. For example, you are a surgeon who knows how to do a certain kind of surgery. I can understand a trip where you go to another country where they don’t have enough surgeons with that specialty, and you perform these surgeries in cooperation with their local hospitals, with the full knowledge, consent and regulation from the local government or regulatory bodies. I would probably feel OK doing that.

But this idea of my going overseas to teach some kids how to read, or to to dig a well, or do something else that is not my expertise, that is what isn’t sitting as well with me anymore.

And speaking of kids, one thing that I used to see advertised but I don’t see anymore and I hope has stopped is the practice of volunteering with kids living in orphanages overseas. This really does not sit well with me at all. I would need to know that it wasn’t harmful to kids to have a revolving door of people coming in and out of their lives. I would need to know that there were really strict background checks of the volunteers who are allowed contact with the kids.

My thoughts on kids have changed quite a bit. I did my volunteer trips largely before the internet really took off and looking back now, I don’t think I would be so quick to take photos of other people’s children. I was reading about the idea that even parents shouldn’t post pics of their kids online and it really got me thinking a lot about the pics that I see all the time of kids on fundraising websites. 

I think the other thing that sort of baffles me now thinking about it, is the idea that we needed to fly all the way to another continent to help with the problem of homelessness. Here at home in America we have adults and children who do not have homes, do not have food, and do not have clean water. So even if you were a person with actual construction expertise, or a water sanitation engineer or something, we could also just see if everyone in our local community has those things.

So when it comes to this topic of volunteer tourism, I’ve really come around to changing my mind about a lot of things I used to be OK with. If you’re starting to plan out your travel and thinking about doing some volunteer tourism, I’d love to hear how you’re thinking about it.
On this show the main topic is how we can align our social impact values and what we do with our money on a daily basis, so I don’t think volunteering has come up before on the show, but if you do volunteer, I’d love to hear about that too. A friend of mine was saying that it can be challenging to find volunteer opportunities that can include her youngest, if you’ve found a way to do that with kids, I’d love to hear about that too.

Any other episodes you’d like to hear on the show, send an email anytime. The email address is spend donate invest at gmail dot com. And there’s a newly refreshed website located at spend donate invest dot world. That’s where you can sign up for the monthlyish newsletter. It is very low key, no spam, don’t worry.

I think I’ll stop here for today. Have a good one and let’s talk again soon!