Voluntourism
The White Savior Complex
Voluntourism is done with the best intentions but can have consequences that aren’t foreseen by the people who are just wanting to help. While not inherently bad it does lead to consequences that can severely hurt the communities that they are there to help but it doesn’t always negatively affect those communities. It’s a balancing act of benefits and consequences that we as a society have to determine if it is more of a detrimental act than a beneficial one. Many of the benefits that are attributed to the voluntourism industry are believed to be achievable without the need of the people to go over to the communities themselves but to give their money to local organizations instead it can be spent more effectively.
There are many benefits to voluntourism that can help communities. A huge thing volunteers can accomplish for organizations is the ability to do something that just wouldn’t even exist without them. This quote from Ken Budd about his time in Costa Rico “It wasn’t a choice between volunteers and paid teachers; it was a choice between volunteers and not offering English class”. These kinds of activities that volunteers can do for organizations can benefit the communities that the travel to help. When the only other option is to just not have the class because they can’t afford to pay a teacher is essential for what volunteering should be but not always what it is. Often, we see that the money that volunteers spend on going over to these places would be better spent on just donations that can be more effectively spent in those communities. “The houses in Honduras built by international volunteers cost $30,000 apiece, including airfare, while local Christian organisations could build them for $2,000. If well-wishers had contributed money instead of labour, 15 times more houses could have been built. The helpful choice would have been to stay at home.”
It’s not the fault of the volunteers who want to go over and help these communities they have the best of intentions to go over there and help but overlooking cases like being able to build 15 times more houses with the money they spent on going over there. With cases like that you get to wondering about Budd’s case of going to teach English in Costa Rico and whether or not the organization could hire an actual English teacher with the money, they spend traveling to that communities or even if they could offer more than one class from it. However, the benefits of donations from people around the volunteers once they get home can be very beneficial many organizations make money from donations not just from the people they have come to the communities but the word of mouth the volunteers do when they get home. “Charities need to raise money to do their work on their ground, and volunteers can help be a part of that puzzle, both for a public relations image, and to drive more donations back to the organization.” These volunteers aren’t always there just to volunteer for these projects but sometimes there to be able to raise awareness and drive donations there from people around them and others that the volunteer can influence to help those organizations. Many times, just the awareness of the situations can overcome the need that the communities have for the help they get, and it can then lead to something overly done by voluntourism to something that hurts the communities in the long run.
As Rosenburg discusses in her article the generosity of good people cannot always help the communities the way they are perceived to be doing. One of the huge things that voluntourism delivered for these communities is the idea that these areas need orphanages for the children there and to help these parentless children but in reality, that’s not what is going on. “Save the Children looked at orphanages in Sri Lanka in 2005 and found that 92% of children had a living parent. A 2006 survey by Unicef in Liberia found that 98% of children living in orphanages were not orphans.” Continued in the article Rosenburg says “Lumos found that these institutions get at least $100m a year in foreign donations. That is half the total amount of US aid to Haiti last year, five times the budget of Haiti’s social affairs ministry, and 130 times the country’s child protection budget”. This is what leads to the children being put in those institutions even though they have a living family that could take care of them if they were able to have that money diverted to a better system that helps poor communities and families take care of their children. Instead, foreign donators see marketing efforts from those institutions to get donations because that’s the ways it has always been and they continue to get huge donations instead of the money being put in a place that can make changes for the children in families because experts say that children do better in family systems instead of institutions as Rosenburg brings up in her article. While this wasn’t the intention of those going over and volunteering at these institutions and not by those who would donate to the institutions, but this is what happens because of the efforts to help the communities.
Voluntourism is the epitome of good intentions gone wrong. It is done for the good of those communities that the volunteers go there to help but a lot of the time there are unforeseen consequences of voluntourism. It inefficiently uses funds that could be better spent by local organizations hiring locals to do the task the volunteers from out of the country come and try to do. It keeps institutions alive and even more funded than governmental services, that could offer a better way of taking care of children, and that then leads to child trafficking in the worst situations according to Rosenburg’s article “Girls said that staff abused them, raped them, took them out at night and prostituted them, but no action was taken.” I do agree that this is an extreme situation but keeping institutions that even at the best situations are lesser than having these children stay with their families with aid to help sustain them is wrong and anything worse than the best situations for orphanages makes it exponentially crueler to continue a system that supports those institutions.
Voluntourism is in of itself a horrible thing and the intentions of the volunteers to help communities that do need help is a good thing but the consequences of voluntourism and the inefficient manner of spending make it useless to continue doing. These communities need all the help they can get and voluntourism does help but it continues systems that hurt the community in much bigger ways than the help those communities receive. It isn’t always wrong to travel abroad and help communities but those who do should investigate what they are going to do in those communities and if the money spent getting there would be better spent on a donation to a local organization so they can spend the money in a better way. Voluntourism doesn’t help the communities any more than just pure donations help and hurts communities tremendously more than just pure donations so all in all in does do more harm than good. All it does is soften the guilt many people have.
