By Lachlan O’Sullivan
Last year, in the middle of winter, one of my good friends returned from time overseas. She had booked a flight and spent a month in the Guanxi province in Southeast China, living out of a backpack and hiking along the Li river. After realizing her trek would finish a week earlier than expected, she had organised through a volunteer group to spend a few days giving vaccinations in a small nursing outpost in a village on her route. She enjoyed her time, but when she came to leave, she realised that there was no one to take her place, and that the village’s vaccination program would halve in size when she returned home.
An entire industry has sprouted rapidly from this premise, that many people of different ages and creeds want to see the world and to help those in need at the same time. To experience something ‘authentic’, and return home having given back to the world in the process. Very quickly, tourism companies realised that this was an experience people were willing to pay for, and so an entire industry (‘voluntourism’) began to grow. It grew and it grew, to the point where in 2008, Tourism and Research Marketing estimated the market value of this industry to be upwards of £1.3 billion.
For the tourism industry, this expansion was a no-brainer. They could provide the consumer with short stay package deals, where there was no expectation for luxury in accommodation or culinary mastery. In some countries it is even possible to classify portions or the entirety of trips as tax deductions. In this case, what the people want is clear, achievable and good for business. Win-win.
Unfortunately, what is often left from this picture is actually that which is most important. The recipients of this altruism, ‘those in need of our help’. All too often these short bursts of volunteer assistance are planned with little to no consultation. Knowledge of what people need and how to best deliver it is often not clear, and people like those from a small village in the Guanxi province are the ones who suffer.
Thoughtful engagement, consultation and planning is vital so that interventions may be sustainable, and the footprint left behind minimal. Volunteer organisations need to be wary that they cannot be the purveyors of sympathy tourism, as do volunteers. Empathy and altruism are not able to be purchased and volunteering is not a box to be ticked, nor a guilt offset mechanism. This is a way of giving service to those who need it, in the way that they need it and this motivation needs to be primary.
I do not mean to deny the importance of the work of volunteers, at home or abroad. Volunteer services fund critical programs in areas of the developing world that simply would not exist otherwise. What is important is getting these volunteers truly invested in making sustainable changes. Long-term changes are what will improve the quality of life of those who have little, which after all is the goal of the volunteer, and not of the tourist.
Image: ‘Yangshuo’ by mr. Wood available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/mr_wood/8340996624/ under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0. Full terms at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/