The Verdict on Voluntourism: Yes or No?
It's 1:20am and I’m at the airport about to board a flight to Europe. My laptop tells me I have only 31% battery left until it quells over from alkaline starvation so the race to summarize over three month's worth of participation and observations of voluntourism begins.
The idea of traveling and seeing the world while giving back sounds like an attractive and purposeful use of time. Who wouldn’t want to go on safari one day and teach English the next?
For the past three months, I’ve been doing just that––volunteering at an orphanage in Arusha, Tanzania and going on intermittent adventures in between. But what are the pros and cons and the true cost of a system that sounds almost too good to be true?
In comes community-based tourism.
Let’s go over the basics. Voluntourism was developed
It’s a reality check… for you.
Many of them face challenges blotched by ugly numbers: at present, nearly 1 million kids in Tanzania are orphaned by families affected by HIV and kids in the slums of Arusha live on less than $1 a day.
How to you select a cause?
How do you chose a program
vetting.
What do you want to get out of
vetting.
Do your research
Plan ahead
what do you want to walk away with? What pre-exsiting skills do you have that you can contribute? My background is in design, so I revierted to teaching English and math––things that I didn’t have
What can you bring to the table?
didn’t see any options that stood out But in retrospective, my skills could be better put to use if I’d talked to the teachers about the creative skills and my kids who showed creative disposition to creative work.
Money helps
Donating or fundraising in advance of your trip for a vetted charity or cause of your choice. And then going to the site during your trip to see the yield.
Here comes community based tourism.
Putting your money towards experiences that are driven by the people of the place that you’re visiting. So when you sign up for a tour through a local guide as the expert, you are empowering them to be drivers and storytellers of what they know best—their homes. As the has said––this allows the people to decide how they want to use the money
While this may be common sense,
the next evolution of tourism lays in bringing tourism outside of just city centers and tourist attractions and bringing benefits to places that have not tradionally benefitted from tourism. Places like townships. These are traditionally felt to be unsafe, unstable and perhaps not worthy of an attraction. But just check out some of the rich, virbrant experiences that townships through South Africa has.
Art and music scene
jazz in
Dance
Photography
Food tour in
.
And the benefit is for you to. Not only are you truly getting an authetic experience, you are often met with stories of humanity, truimph and inspiration.
As Jackquline Novogratz, founder of Acumen fund says: “People don’t need handouts. They need dignity.”
Final remarks
Many of the kids are a part of these statistics but none are consumed by them. They all have different stories but one commonality ties them together: resilience. It’s taught me to put things into perspective. Corrupt systems, things feel unfair. But no one here no one here throws up their hands and says.. I give up. While I gave up a life of comfort in New York City, it doesn’t feel like much when I’m walking back home to my gated volunteer house with thirty other 20-something’s who came from first world countries and look exceedingly white. While I see this injustice, something did unite myself and these people togheter—our desire to see other 98% of the world looks like and to see if we can have a hand––albeit small––to do soemthing aobut it. TAnd while voluntourism may not be a one-size-fits solution that solves all, perhaps we all needed this experience to feel hope. To realize that if this isn’t the right system, what is? And how can we bring this mindset back home and do something with it using the skills and resources we do have?