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Voluntourism: Are you here to help?

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[Co-founder of Sentebale Prince Seeiso of Lesotho (checked shirt) helps Starkey Foundation voluteers fit hearing aids for a young girl at Lesotho Cooperative College on October 10, 2013 in Maseru, Lesotho. Skilled volunteers are often welcome abroad, but if you’re only offering unskilled labour on your voluntourism trip, you may not be offering as much help as you’d like to think you are. / Getty Images]

Mariya Aksyonova wanted to help orphans. When one of her friends said they’d be going to Peru for a couple weeks to volunteer at a medical placement, Aksyonova signed up too. With bags packed she headed for Cusco, but the trip wasn’t all she had imagined.

“When I got there they had all the positions filled and didn’t have any more child care placements,” says Aksyonova who booked her placement through International Volunteer Headquarters (IVHQ). “So they told me ‘sorry, all the child care placements are taken, but for now we can send you to this school with kids.”

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For the next two weeks Aksyonova, who doesn’t speak Spanish, assisted teachers with students between ages 6-7 and pre-teen girls at a local orphanage who were enrolled in ESL. Mixing in excursions to Machu Picchu and language lessons, Aksyonova immersed herself in Peru’s culture as she worked on lesson plans for her temporary students.

For most people travel is a way to escape the daily grind of responsibility, to get away for a bit and not work. But for people like Aksyonova, joining the ranks of travellers who want to volunteer while abroad (also known as ‘voluntourism’), responsibility is the whole point of crossing the globe.

Voluntourism is the act of combining volunteer efforts with travel, enabling the volunteer to see the world, while still putting their time to good use. This travel trend has been on the rise for the past decade and continues to grow in popularity amongst the student set.

Not for those looking for a bargain travel deal

With so many students being involved in this type of tourism, it’s easy to see why people may think this form of travel is cheaper. The organization arranging the placement typically covers the room and board for the volunteers, leaving the traveller to pay for their airfare and the organization’s fee, which can be as low as $180.00 USD depending on the company. Compared to resort and hotel prices around the world, this may seem like a bargain, but Aksyonova says people looking to save a buck can travel cheaper by backpacking and should only do voluntourism if they’re looking to contribute to the area they’re placed in.

Stephen Cashman, a medical resident in Winnipeg, has also travelled using IVHQ’s services, volunteering in Nepal and doing educational placements alongside other med students in Ghana and China.

Although Cashman loves travel and enjoyed his experiences abroad, he discourages people from choosing the voluntourism route and suggests travellers keep their volunteer efforts at home.

“Generally volunteer placements involve Westerners who are basically untrained going to a developing country to do something they don’t know how to do very well,” he says. “It might be unskilled labour or something else that can be taught rapidly, but even then developing countries usually lack for money, not unskilled labour. If someone is highly skilled in a niche area it may make sense to volunteer, but even in these cases skills may be difficult to apply through language and cultural barriers, and likely there is someone in that country who is more qualified to do whatever you are thinking about travelling around the world to do. I would argue that if your goal is to help people you are better off donating money, and traveling as a tourist, than donating your time.”

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[It can be cheaper and a better experience for some people if you opt to do a backpacking trip, instead. / Thinkstock]

Aksyonova, like Cashman, enjoyed her time abroad, but in the end didn’t feel like she’d made an impact. She was disappointed that IVHQ promised her a childcare placement that they weren’t able to honour and felt as if her time would have been better spent building something instead of teaching.

“Next time I want to go and actually help build something because than you feel like you can see the results of your labour,” she says, adding that two weeks volunteering was not enough time to make a difference. “I was looking into going and building a school, or building a church, or a house and then I feel I’ve done something.”

Building long-term relationships with a region

While some experiences can leave travellers wanting more from their volunteer efforts, others can lead to annual trips and even life-changing events.

Repeat volunteer Laurena Zondo has been returning to Rwanda since 2005 on an almost annual basis and has helped set up a youth media initiative in Africa called A Peace of Life.

Zondo’s first trip to Rwanda was with a volunteer filmmaker who was working on a short film for the global mission organization employing Zondo. This trip was the catalyst for her now-decade of volunteering abroad.

“On part of this trip, I met a church group in Rwanda who had schools across the country,” she says of her first visit in 2005. “This encounter, and the friendship and conversation over the next months, led to my return the following year, on my own, as a volunteer over my holidays.”

Zondo’s repeat visits to Africa, which developed into the A Peace of Life initiative, have rippled out to her community and now youth from her church, Youth Baptist in Toronto, volunteer with her media initiative every year.

“It’s like any travel, there is good and bad,” Zondo says about the pros and cons of voluntourism. “This kind of experience takes more energy – mentally, spiritually – if you are really engaging in a different context or culture, and confronting some of the harsh realities of poverty and social injustice. It changes you and your worldview.”

“For me, the volunteer activities, new friends made, and conversations with students and others I met along the way, sparked an idea for working together on a peace camp, to help youth to meet, share ideas, and receive training on peacebuilding.”

Zondo would recommend people try voluntourism, but says there’s a big “if” involved in that suggestion.

“I don’t look at it as combining volunteerism with travel,” she says. “It’s not an option that is tacked on to a holiday to ‘do some good’ somewhere. Instead, your mindset is that you are volunteering and want to see another part of the world up close, in a deeper, more meaningful way.”

As a long-time volunteer with experiences abroad, we asked Zondo what her advice would be for people trying voluntourism for the first time. Here are her top five tips:

  • You have to go with an open heart to meet people, to want to understand a little more of their life and country, and to learn from them. You are not an expert flying in to do a good thing. So go to listen, explore, and learn.

  • Be respectful, in attitude, clothing, language - you are a guest in the country. It’s a privilege being able to travel to another place.

  • Depending on where you travel, reflect in advance how you will handle meeting someone with a heartbreaking need. Don’t hand out money or other things. Work on a response with your local host or contact a local organization that has services or projects that you can support with a donation.

  • Don’t bring any used clothing with you to hand out or any other supplies that can be bought in the country.

  • Go with a sense of humor and be flexible. Things will never go exactly as planned, and you will make mistakes, but that’s precisely the point. Life happens and it’s sometimes messy. Open yourself up to learn something new about yourself and the world out there.