The Thorny Issue of Orphanage Volunteering

Well-founded criticisms tangle with on-the-ground realities. Should volunteers be part of the mix?

In a barrage of tweets last year, JK Rowling didn’t mince words when it came to her feelings about orphanage volunteering. Taking to Twitter, the Harry Potter author said she would never support the growing phenomenon of individuals travelling to developing countries to carry out volunteer work—especially when it comes to orphanages.

“#Voluntourism is one of [the] drivers of family break-up in very poor countries. It incentivizes 'orphanages' that are run as businesses,” she wrote.

While Rowling brought new attention to the subject, her criticism is not original. For decades, working at orphanages has been a popular volunteer abroad activity. However, recently the criticism has intensified as the industry has grown. Many countries, including Nepal, Uganda and Cambodia have witnessed an increase in the number of orphanages—one that coincides with a rise in foreign volunteers.

Social support or dodgy business?

For Hanna Voelkl, a social worker, volunteering in orphanages is an absolute no-go.

“Voluntourism in orphanages is a business basically playing with the emotions of people and using vulnerable children in poverty to do so. They are not sustainable at all and do a lot of harm,” she says.

As part of her Master’s research, Voelkl spent two months in an orphanage in Ghana conducting a qualitative case study of the experiences of orphans who interacted with international volunteers there. Her research was one of the first studies that approached the issue from a child’s perspective.

Her conclusion? The children associated the volunteers mainly with giving and receiving material goods. Voelkl believes volunteering in orphanages only serves to perpetuate stereotypes of Western volunteers as “saviours”, without focusing on the needs of the children or empowering communities to help them.

During her research, Voelkl became sceptical that money being sent to the orphanage even reached the children. When she first arrived, the number of children who didn’t have shoes, toothbrushes, mosquito nets, beds or educational materials shocked her. While she was not able to verify it, she believes this may have been a strategy to create the impression that the orphanage needed funds in order to solicit more donations as a source of income for those who run it.

When she overheard Ghanaians talking about starting orphanages as profitable businesses, her suspicions were raised further—and they may not be unfounded. UNICEF has expressed concern that orphanages in Cambodia are turning to tourism to attract money. As a result, children are put at risk for abuse and neglect, and well-meaning tourists are unwittingly funding a system that separates children from their families. Cambodia has seen a 75 per cent increase in orphanages since 2005. Over that same period, foreign arrivals increased by 250 per cent.

This same trend can been seen in Nepal, where there are 743 children’s homes; a number that has “mushroomed” in recent years, according to a Arjun Garigain, a researcher on orphan care in Nepali communities.

This is a change that Claire Bennett, co-founder of Learning Service, an organization that teaches people about responsible volunteering, has witnessed firsthand living in Nepal.

“There were very few orphanages until money started coming from foreign donors,” says Bennett. “The more that foreign volunteers and donors support orphanages, the more children are separated from their families or their communities in order to fill them.”

A lack of alternatives

American Linda Unsicker, 68, says that in all her years of volunteering that’s never been her impression. She and her late husband spent 11 years giving their time in various countries around the world. Her most recent solo venture was with a children’s orphanage in Rabat, Morocco, where she’s now been three times.

“The volunteer's function is to give some one-on-one time to the children to help the fantastic staff also have more time with them,” she says.

Bennett acknowledges that children in orphanages are crying out for attention, but she doesn’t believe the problem can be solved with “a conveyor belt of untrained foreign volunteers.”

“As harsh as this sounds, it is a little selfish to go abroad to interact with vulnerable children because it feels good to you, when there is a lot of research to say that this damages children,” says Bennett. She says that high volunteer turnover has the potential to fuel attachment disorders. What the kids ultimately need are trained, long-term caregivers with whom they can form healthy relationships.

Farhana Rehman-Furs, Chief Program Officer at Cross-Cultural Solutions (CCS), a volunteer-sending organization that includes assisting at orphanages among its programs, acknowledges that in some regions of the world, “a handful of bad seeds in the industry have negatively affected certain orphanages." But she says this could be avoided if prospective volunteers were better informed and were more careful to choose placements through organizations that follow best practices for sustainable development, such as having strict vetting policies for establishing international partnerships and thorough monitoring and evaluation of programs.

“We agree with child development experts that children benefit most developmentally from a secure family environment. [However] the reality on the ground in many of our countries is simply not conducive or developed to institute adoption and fostering as a possibility,” wrote Rehman-Furs in a response to Rowling’s tweets. “We support the campaign by experts to combat ‘pop-up’ profit-making orphanages, yet we also know from experience that for many children, orphanages are the only alternative.”

As the only alternative, volunteers can play a role in the day-to-day operations. In partnership surveys and evaluations conducted by CCS, orphanage staff reported that international volunteers helped not only in providing care to children, but also in “combatting pervasive stereotypes.” 

Another volunteer-sending organization, Pod Volunteer, takes a similar stance. “Local [orphanage] staff are often overstretched and volunteers help with the general workload and day-to-day running of the orphanages with tasks such as maintenance, cleaning and laundry enabling there to be more time and opportunity for the local staff to spend directly with the children,” they state on their website. 

Ultimately, Rehman-Furs points out that it's the volunteer-sending organization's responsibility to take the protection of children seriously. She adds that CCS has worked with most of their orphanage partners for more than a decade and when a volunteer is assigned a placement, money is never sent to the orphanage. As a result, there is no direct financial benefit for the orphanage to host volunteers. The volunteers' placement fees cover their accommodation, food and the salaries of CCS's in-country staff, who ensure that volunteers are properly trained and are not engaging in any activities that they're not qualified to do.

Support in all the wrong places

It's been widely reported that the majority of children in orphanages are not, in fact, orphans; most have at least one surviving parent and likely other living relatives, as well. In Cambodia, for example, UNICEF puts the number of "non-orphans" in institutional care at 77 per cent. In other countries, it's even higher.

But does this mean the majority of children in orphanages don't really need support and care? Quite the opposite, in fact. The prevailing reason vulnerable children are placed in orphanages by their families is because they are desperately poor and, in the absence of other supports, feel it is the only way for a child to have adequate food and the possibility of an education.

In the aftermath of the December 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean, there were reports that thousands of children had been orphaned. In response, the Indonesian government invested in institutional care to protect these vulnerable children. Foreign money poured in—to the tune of $5.4 million between 2005 and 2007—and many new children’s residences were built. But a 2006 case study, conducted by Save the Children-UK and the Indonesian Ministry of Social Affairs, determined that more than 97 per cent of the "tsunami orphans" had, in fact, been placed in care by their families.

The destruction caused by the tsunami—and the crippling poverty that ensued—meant that families could no longer afford education for their children. Residential care was seen as their only option.

But what if that money had been directed toward supporting families and communities instead of building more residential care facilities? It's entirely probable that the majority of those children would have remained with their families.

Is there a legitimate role for volunteers?

Institutional care can expose children to abuse and neglect and, particularly with children under the age of three, causing significant psychological harm. It’s been widely documented that children fare better in a family-like setting. But are there situations where residential care is a valid solution? UK-based charity, Save the Children, says "yes"—but it is an emphatically limited yes.

They acknowledge that in some situations, placing a child in short-term institutional care might be the only option—for example, children requiring specialized care for severe disabilities or teenagers temporarily awaiting a more suitable long-term alternative. But otherwise, they stress that all other family-based options should be explored (fostering or adoption, for example). They also stress that in situations where residential care is the only option for a child, it should be in the form of a group home, with a small number children and consistent adult care in a family-like setting.

Is there a role for volunteers in these cases? Bennett argues that even highly skilled volunteers—such as early childhood educators—shouldn’t be involved directly with children. Instead, their skills are better put to use running capacity building programs with permanent local staff.

Mark Riley is the director and a co-founder of Alternative Care Initiatives, an organization working with the Ugandan government and others on child welfare reforms in Uganda and east Africa. In a 2016 article for the Guardian he says orphanages don't address the underlying problems causing children to be separated from their families and, in many cases, they contribute to the problem. "Orphanages are an intervention without an exit strategy," he writes.

But he also points out that with increasing awareness of the negative impacts orphanages can have, many traditional supporters of orphanages are changing their tack.

"Some of these organizations receive foreign volunteers and mission trips, [but] their emphasis is on supporting families and alternative family-based care, with good social work practices at the centre."

This article was originally published in the Winter 2017 issue of Verge Magazine - Travel With Purpose®

SAM MEDNICK

Sam Mednick is a Canadian journalist currently based in South Sudan. Over the past 12 years she’s reported on humanitarian, human interest and conflict stories from around the world. Sam’s work has taken her to the Middle East, Africa, Asia, South America and Europe, writing for VICE, the Associated Press, Devex, Barcelona Metropolitan, iPolitics amongst others. Sam also produces and hosts the Happy Melly Podcast, interviewing authors, speakers and thought leaders about what it takes to live productive and fulfilling lives. Previously, Sam lived in Barcelona for almost 10 years and hosted its first English weekly radio show, Fuel4Fridays.

5 Terrible Things You Do When You Travel (That Don’t Seem That Bad)

THE CURSE OF LIVING IN THE MODERN world is that evil acts are not required for evil things to happen. A mother looks away from her 3-year-old son for a few seconds, and a gorilla gets killed. Tourists see a calf that looks cold, try to help it, and inadvertently ensure its death. A 21-year-old student takes an ill-advised souvenir in North Korea and becomes an imprisoned pawn in an ongoing diplomatic fight.

Small acts can have huge repercussions, and you don’t need to act maliciously to cause serious harm. The problem, of course, is that most of this harm is caused by innocent ignorance, and human ignorance is almost limitless.

So not doing harm can seem like an uphill battle. Here are a few things you do regularly while traveling that cause more harm than you realize.

1. You wear sunscreen while swimming in the ocean.

I know: Baz Luhrmann told you to always wear sunscreen. And he wasn’t wrong: UV damage sucks, and can cause some serious health problems. But if you’re going to go swimming in the ocean, you want to make sure you’re wearing the right type of sunscreen.

Most regular sunscreens contain a chemical called oxybenzone, which can disrupt coral growth. Coral reefs are the most important aquatic ecosystems, and are dying off around the world thanks to climate change and overfishing. But oxybenzone in sunscreen isn’t helping either: a single drop of it in an Olympic swimming pool-sized body of water can have harmful effects on coral reefs. So instead, buy and use a reef-friendly sunscreen.

2. You give money to child beggars.

Helping a child is maybe one of the most noble impulses a human being can have. Unfortunately, that makes it really easy to exploit. Especially in developing countries like India, “organized begging” is a serious problem. Children are recruited by violent thugs and are forced to beg. And since disabled children make more money as beggars, the thugs will sometimes mutilate the kids. Some kids are intentionally hooked on drugs, so they won’t run away from their criminal syndicate supplier. And the money ends up in the pockets of the criminals, not helping the actual children.

Instead of giving money to kids, set aside money for a worthy organization. Here are a few that help the poor:

Oxfam
UNICEF
Population Services International
Free the Slaves
Save the Children

3. You participate in orphanage tourism.

Another entry in the “awful things that are done in the name of helping children” is the terrible orphanage tourism industry. This isn’t to say that orphanages that accept tourist visitors are all terrible places, but some are.

Intrepid Travel did a great piece on this a few weeks ago. They pointed out that orphanage tourism perversely makes orphans into an in-demand commodity, and that often, the kids actually have families. Orphans are not zoo animals, and in a just world, they would not be a commodity. If you really want to help, don’t feed the orphanage tourism industry.

4. You volunteer in not-very-helpful ways.

If you’re a doctor or a construction worker, you may have skills that could be very helpful in a foreign country. If you have those skills, you should volunteer abroad. But if you don’t have a very specific set of skills, then often, your help with, say, building a house, isn’t going to be all that valuable.

Voluntourism comes from a very noble impulse, but it’s super tricky. Before going abroad to volunteer, ask yourself: “Am I the best person to help out here? Am I properly trained to do this work? Will I really be helping?”

If you aren’t sure, the better choice may be to donate money instead.

5. You go a little too far in trying to take a picture with wild animals.

2016 has been the year of the harmful animal selfie. There’s the woman who got her clock cleaned when she tried to take a picture of an elk. There are the horrifying discoveries that have accompanied the closing of Thailand’s “Tiger Temple.” And seal calfs keep getting abandoned by their mothers after tourists take selfies with them.

Look: it’s understandable. You want to take a picture with the cute animal. But there are a few simple rules you can follow if you don’t want to do harm:

Do not approach wild animals. They are wild animals, and unless you really know what you’re doing, you can harm them, and they can harm you.

If you see a tourist attraction that allows you to interact with animals that it would normally be dangerous for humans to interact with, then the animals are probably being kept sedated. So don’t hang out with lion and tiger cubs, as irresistibly cute as they may be.

If you want to see the wildlife, the best place to see it is in its natural environment. This will require that you be patient, and it may mean you don’t see everything you want to see. But it’s better for the animals, and it’s ultimately more rewarding.

Animals aren’t humans. Don’t assume that their behaviors will be the exact same as human behaviors, or that they do things for human reasons.

These aren’t the only ways in which ignorance can do a good amount of harm, but they’re a good place to start. If you want to do more good than harm when you travel, do your research ahead of time. It’s natural to want to help, but you should know how to help before you start helping. Otherwise, it’s very likely you’ll do more harm than good.

THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON MATADOR NETWORK. 

MATT HERSHBERGER

Matt Hershberger is a writer and blogger who focuses on travel, culture, politics, and global citizenship. His hobbies include scotch consumption, profanity, and human rights activism. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and his Kindle. You can check out his work at the Matador Network, or over at his website.

Little White Girls Aren't the Problem with Voluntourism, Privilege Is.

“Isn’t race only an issue for those who make it one?” a British woman at Tourism Concern’s International Volunteering Conference asked. “Americans are, after all, obsessed with race,” she added. This wasn’t said as a compliment; it was posed with a hint of derision, as if our attempts at open dialogues on race are only one of a slew of problematic traits that she could point out. Now, I can’t say that we have the whole “talking about race” thing down in any way. Most of the time we suck at it, but while the questioner was wrong her query brought up a good point.

Race dynamics are an important factor in voluntourism, but they aren’t everything.

When it comes to the power dynamics of voluntourism, it is all about privilege. Privilege comes in a multitude of forms and is sometimes hard to identify. There is racial privilege, then there is economic privilege, educational privilege, geographic privilege, gender privilege, religious privilege, privilege that comes with adhering to heteronormative standards, skinny privilege, and a million more that have yet to be recognized or that I just do not know.

Privilege is, at its core, easy to identify but difficult to own up to. Those who experience it, myself included, struggle to openly recognize its existence as we hope beyond hope that our kind intentions and good will are enough to overcome it. But they aren’t. Intentions are not enough. The specter of privilege is unshakable and those who wish to deny it, those who say that race and other forms of privilege only matter when we bring them up, are naïve.

This is not to say that those who are privileged cannot do good work. Rather, their privilege, especially educational privilege, can be an asset in volunteering. Having a particular skill to offer can be priceless. Engineers can create solutions for regional water issues, doctors can train local physicians in new techniques, and educators can teach their local peers new styles resulting in better-educated students. Having specialized skills is awesome and often very helpful.

But privilege isn’t always an asset and often times in order to do aid right, volunteering shouldn’t even be a part of the equation.

This is specifically true for young would-be volunteers. Developing countries are, by and large, resource poor. One resource that they have more than enough of is unskilled labor. So why are we exporting unskilled labor to them by the millions?

To think that the only way to provide aid is to volunteer is to ignore the opportunities that exist for people to actively stimulate economies through ethical tourism. With voluntourism, those looking to volunteer carry their donations and privilege thousands of miles and an unbalanced give-and-take relationship is almost always inevitable. Accepting ones role as a tourist by supporting locally owned businesses is a form of stimulus sure to last much longer than a wall you spent three days painting in Honduras.

So this isn’t really about little white girls. It’s about everyone.

It’s about unrecognized privilege and it’s about an unequal exchange where volunteers benefit greatly and those who are meant to benefit rarely do so in a sustainable and long-term manner. More than anything, it’s about learning to help without having to hold the title of volunteer.

Travel as much as you possibly can. Experience cultures and get involved with communities, but do so in a way that economically invests in the places you care about and want to see made even better. Do this by staying in locally owned hotels, eating at locally owned restaurants, and frequenting locally owned businesses. Sometimes that means doing the hard work yourself, but there are some great companies and non-profits that are can do the work for you. Tourism Concern offers a number of options and Onwards started running trips in the spring.

Recognize privilege, open a dialogue, and accept that what you can offer comes with limitations.

Most importantly, don’t just volunteer in communities; invest in communities.

Quotes are paraphrased. 

THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON PIPPABIDDLE.COM.

PIPPA BIDDLE

Pippa Biddle is a writer. Her work has been published by The New York Times online, Antillean Media Group, The FBomb, MTV, Elite Daily, Go Overseas, Matador Network, and more. She is a graduate of Columbia University with a degree in Creative Writing. Twitter: @PhilippaBiddle
 

Voluntourism: What could go wrong when trying to do right?

Voluntourism: What could go wrong when trying to do right?

During the past eight years, as I have joined and then lead volunteer programs in Asia, I have seen many of the same mistakes repeated when it comes to international “voluntourism”, I have made many of these mistakes myself. I know how easy it is to offer a trip that is easy to sell, fits in with travelers’ demands, appears to have a plan for a positive impact, but in the end ends up being either a waste of time for the local community partners or, in the worst cases, causes more harm than good. Here are some of the common problems I have seen in the voluntourism market and some tips for travelers on how to choose the right program.

Creating one-off projects which have little long-term impact

Often times the real needs of a project are not things that volunteers can easily support. Language barriers, lack of local knowledge, and lack of skills prevent volunteers from being a good fit for most development project needs, so instead tour companies often create projects for the volunteer.

These projects typically involve little investment of energy and ideas in people. The core needs of the partner might have been teacher training for their school, soil enhancement techniques to improve farming, etc. Because volunteers can’t help with those things, a project is instead created to fill the desire of the traveler to “feel helpful”, and the core needs are overlooked for those where it was simpler to insert unskilled volunteers. These projects might be building a fence or painting a school, and it is likely that the tour company will do little to monitor the project other than stopping by twice a year with their tourists to take a picture of “the school they are helping.”

Real life example: I really did travel with a tour company that decided to allow us to paint the school that was on their bike route. We painted it poorly, I must say, as we rushed to complete it in one day (and most of us felt too tired to put in a big effort). We probably spent $200 on paint (25% of which we dropped on the floor). The project was in rural Thailand, and $200 could have probably bought a lot of educational resources, hired a few teachers for a month, or done a list of other things which would have added more educational value than our patchy blue paint job. If they insisted on painting, if they had instead funded $3000 towards a locally identified educational need (for example, a weekly life-skills training course), plus bought $200 worth of paint, at least then our combined efforts would have been more than just the blue paint on the floor.

How to choose: Ask the tour operator about their relationship with the NGO partner. Have they worked together long? If the answer is yes, that’s a good thing. How do they choose what projects the travelers will engage in? If the local communities or NGO partners are making the decisions and have veto power over ideas they don’t like, that is better than ideas coming from the tour company based on unfounded assumptions of needs. For all of these answers, getting in touch with both someone who had gone on the trip before and someone working in the country where you are visiting to get their perspective on the company and NGO partner will shine a more realistic light on the situation.

Forgetting that volunteers are NOT free

A lot of tour operators will bring their clients to a project and expect an NGO or community program to entertain their guests by speaking to them about their work or organizing a small volunteer project. They put the NGOs or orphanages on their site, sell them to clients as part of a tour, yet keep all of the tour profits themselves. Sometimes the tour company says, “We leave it up to the tourists to see if they want to donate!”, but it should not be the tourists’ responsibility to ensure that the development partner gets value out of the trip in exchange for their time.

Real life example: As an NGO, at PEPY we sometimes get requests from tour companies to come see our projects. They want to include a visit to our programs as a part of their tour, which they will market to their clients. To entertain a group for a few hours and explain our projects would take time away from management staff.

How to choose: If you know that your skills are not precisely matched with the needs of a project, or if the interactions you are having with partner NGOs are taking their time away from their core mission, ask and find out if the tour company is compensating the person or group presenting to or facilitating your community interaction.  If they are not, yet the tour company is marking this part of the experience as a selling point of the tour, then they are probably putting the desire for their own profits over a the need to provide real support for these groups.

Giving things away

As Saundra has told us over and over again and as I have learned through seeing the negative effects of an unbridled tourism culture of giving things away “to the poor people”, giving things to people is never going to solve their problems. Instead, it can destroy local markets, create community jealousies, and create a culture of dependency.

Real life example: I wish this WASN’T real… but sadly, this is what a lot of “responsible” tourism has come to. There are tour operators in Cambodia where you can pay $45 for the day to be driven out to a “poor village where you can hand out food or school supplies to the poor family of your choice”. Oh yes, people pay for this. It’s like buying food pellets at the zoo to feed the goats. Except these are people. Not goats.

How to choose: Question any organization that allows you and your tour group to go anywhere to “hand out school supplies” or “deliver a book to a child”. If those items are needed, they should be distributed through local power structures, in ways where those with the highest needs are prioritized, and where capacity building is tied in with the giving away of things.

Monitoring projects poorly or not at all

How can a tour company that comes through an area a few times a year know that they are “improving lives through our wells”? Do they go back and test them? Fix them? Get feedback? Sometimes we think we are helping people, but it is not until we try it and fail that we realize our plan was flawed. What is worse is if we continue to repeat our failures, either from lack of willingness to admit them, or lack of effort to research our impacts.

Real life example: A tour company in India allowed tourists to hand out goats to families on their tours. In the middle of the tour, a person from a nearby village came and told the director that the man who had been put in charge of choosing which poor families should get the goats had been charging the families for the goats for years. The tour company had been making their English speaking tour guide rich, were not helping “the poorest of the poor” that they claimed to be, and had furthered corruption and mistrust in the village.

How to choose: Ask about the NGO’s monitoring plan. If you are building any structures or giving away any technology, find out how those things are being put to use and who will monitor the needs in case of damage or additional ideas for improvements. Is there a responsible NGO partner involved in these projects full-time who can make the changes needed to ensure the program’s success? If you feel that the tour company’s projects are one-off initiatives with little relationship building on their part with the community, find a new operator.

Giving unskilled volunteers jobs that require skills

Even painting requires some skills, and clearly our group in Thailand didn’t have them. Teaching English should not be left to 19 year old gap years, especially in countries where there are plenty of unemployed local English speakers. If we don’t know how to do what we are supposed to be doing as volunteers, we might cause more harm than good, and at minimum, we will waste a lot of people’s time.

Real life example: There are many orphanages in Cambodia which take volunteers to teach English. Some come for a few weeks, others for a few days. When they leave, the classes have no teacher, there is no curriculum to ensure that the students aren’t learning “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes” every day, and the school is not better able to solve its own problems in the future because of the volunteer’s visit. If skilled teachers had spent time teaching English teachers English, they would have improved the system at least slightly, but sadly, everyone just wants to pet the cute kids.

How to choose: If you are looking for a long term placement, make sure to pick an operator that does very thorough matching of skills and needs. For short term placements, choose groups focused on educating you as a traveler, and giving you the skills and tools to improve the world when you go home. We have to learn before we can help. Choosing a trip focused on your education, which doesn’t assume that every wealthy traveler has construction skills, will empower you to be better equipped to support responsible initiatives in the future.

Forgetting to make the rest of the time on their trip “responsible”

There is a lot of discussion about the “volunteer time”, but what about the rest of the trip? Where are you being put up? What restaurants are you eating at? Those things matter just as much as the volunteer time, and just like carbon offsetting, if you are trying to do good by giving money to development projects, yet causing harm in all of your day-to-day activities, the two do not balance out.

Real life example: A responsible tourism organization based abroad was planning their trip to Cambodia and had contacted us to learn more about our work. When I met with the trip coordinator at their hotel, I realized that they had chosen to stay at a hotel owned in part by a very well known corrupt politician. Had they spent the time to ask anyone working in responsible travel in Cambodia about their hotel and restaurant choices, they would have found much more well-respected places in which to spend their money.

How to choose: Ask your voluntourism partner about the rest of the trip and how they make their choices. If they outsource their entire trip to a partner or if they are selling trips in tens of countries around the world, they likely do not know the people and places they are visiting well, and are less likely to be offering you a chance to have a positive impact with your tourism dollars.

Fostering moral imperialism

This one is the biggest problem I think, but the least talked about. We assume, because we come from wealthier places with better education systems, that we can come into any new place without knowing much about the culture or the people, and we can fix things. We can’t! THEY, the people who live there and know the place well, can. Our job in the development world can and should be to support them in doing so. So, we can’t assume we can come do it for them and “save the babies” by visiting an orphanage for a few hours on our trip to India. And we sure shouldn’t think that our time is oh so valuable that we should fundraise money to pay for OUR flights to go paint a school poorly. My job, in running a tour operation, is to educate travelers on at least these two points: improvements take time, and the people we are visiting have just as much—if not more—to teach us as we have to teach them.

Real life example: Just search for voluntourism on the web. “Come to XXXXX, Africa and save the world,” followed by instructions on how to fundraise tax free dollars, which include the price of your travel abroad.

How to choose: If we are going to send our students abroad without charging them, we should at least tell them the truth: THEY are the ones benefiting in this situation. Let’s start being realistic and not deciding to go abroad to help, but instead to learn. If you find a company that discusses the trip as “life-changing” for the communities you are visiting, scroll further until you find one that admits that the real selling point is that the experience will be life-changing for YOU. That is OK! That is why we travel, so let’s not try to hide that. If your tour company talks about all of their successes at helping people, but will not give you examples of times they have made mistakes, lessons they have learned, or things they are doing differently now compared with three years ago, don’t trust them. They clearly think that just because they are setting out to do good, that they are. Remind them that Good Intentions are NOT Enough.

It’s time to stop making the same mistakes

Now that enough of us have made these mistakes and learned from them, it is time for others to stop making the same mistakes. To make the overall impact of volunteer travel more positive will take a movement of travelers demanding responsible practices from their operators. Please add comments or tips for travelers which you think might give them additional ideas for picking the best organized voluntourism programs.

THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON LESSONS I LEARNED.

DANIELA PAPI

Daniela is the Deputy Director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship. She has spearheaded student programming initiatives at Saïd Business School including the Leading for Impact programme and had taught on MBA courses including the Entrepreneurship Project and a course on high-impact entrepreneurship. Daniela is a graduate of Saïd Business School's MBA programme and was a Skoll Scholarship recipient. 

Prior to coming to Oxford, Daniela spent six years in Cambodia where she grew a youth leadership organization, PEPY, an educational travel company, PEPY Tours, and an advocacy organisation, Learning Service. Daniela is co-authoring a book advocating for a 'Learning Service' approach to philanthropic and volunteer travel and has worked as a consultant to other social impact organizations, typically supporting their strategy redesign by incorporating her experience in social marketing and user-centered programme design. She recently wrote a report called 'Tackling Heropreneurship' focused on fuelling collective impact through an 'apprenticing with a problem' approach.

Check out Learning Service for more.

DANIELA PAPI

Daniela is the Deputy Director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship. She has spearheaded student programming initiatives at Saïd Business School including the Leading for Impact programme and had taught on MBA courses including the Entrepreneurship Project and a course on high-impact entrepreneurship. Daniela is a graduate of Saïd Business School's MBA programme and was a Skoll Scholarship recipient. 

Prior to coming to Oxford, Daniela spent six years in Cambodia where she grew a youth leadership organization, PEPY, an educational travel company, PEPY Tours, and an advocacy organisation, Learning Service. Daniela is co-authoring a book advocating for a 'Learning Service' approach to philanthropic and volunteer travel and has worked as a consultant to other social impact organizations, typically supporting their strategy redesign by incorporating her experience in social marketing and user-centered programme design. She recently wrote a report called 'Tackling Heropreneurship' focused on fuelling collective impact through an 'apprenticing with a problem' approach.

Check out Learning Service for more.

CHINA: Love is Blind

The recently relaxed one-child policy in China led many parents to abandon children who were born with mental or physical disabilities.

Photographer Alice Carfrae travelled between Beijing and Zhengzhou to visit two projects run by Bethel, a dedicated organization that is set up to provide high-quality care, education, life skills and livelihood opportunities to blind and visually impaired children in China through foster care projects. Bethel also runs an associate programme in training and outreach called 555, which aims to prevent blindness, lower orphan rates and conduct eye screenings to identify young visually-impaired children living in the country.

Above: (Left) Cane belonging to En Hong who arrived at Bethel in 2008. They believe she may have been living on the streets. (Right) Yuan Ming has albinism. He came into Bethel’s care when he was just a year old. He has learned to walk and he is now talking a lot. 

Almost all of the children helped by Bethel have been abandoned by their parents, because they have a physical or mental health problems. Susan Ou, manager of Bethel’s Love is Blind project, says minor disabilities such as missing fingers can be reason enough for parents to abandon a child.

Above: (Far left) Gui Gui hugs his friend as they wait in line for lunch and then gives his teacher a big hug (middle). (Right) A teacher takes Ai Fei’s hand and guides her to class. 

In the past decades, China’s One Child policy has exacerbated this problem as a great deal of pressure is put on the child to provide for the rest of the family, especially for their parents as they reach old age. If they are unable to work, they cannot meet this requirement or support the family, and this leads some parents to abandon their child.

Above: Children attend a cognitive skills class at Bethel. Developing cognitive skills by moving parts of the body and using the senses at a young age is a very important for a child with a visual impairment. 

There are two projects within the Love is Blind programme. The first is a partnership between Bethel and an orphanage in Zhengzhou and another orphanage in Dou Dian, outside Beijing, which includes a farm, school and home for visually impaired children.

Above: (Left) Hong Fa plays the Chinese flute whilst his friend Xiao Dong listens. Peter (middle, right) loves to sing and has a perfect tenor voice. He was awarded a scholarship for his excellent work which he spent on music lessons.

Speech therapy is now regarded as a vital component for many of the children, and music also plays a huge part in the children’s lives, with specially designed music rooms offering stimulation and relaxation.

Above: Jian Ang (left) helps Jianshan do up his jacket at the orphanage in Zhengzhou. 

Early on, children are encouraged to understand the concept of their own bodies, which instils confidence and a strong sense of self. At Bethel, both the environment and the children are very well cared for, and this, in turn, helps to prevent the kind of discrimination against disabilities, which has pervaded wider Chinese society for many years.

Above: (Left) Yuan Ming has albinism, when he came into Bethel’s care he was just a year old. He has learned to walk and he is now talking a lot. (Right) Jian Ang also has albinism. When he arrived, he was a tiny, weak baby. Now he runs everywhere and does well in class. 

The role of education, whatever their needs, is paramount. 

Above: (Left) a caregiver touches the head of a child and describes what it does so that he understands the concept of his body. (Middle) Xuerou plays with her teacher, before coming to Bethel she could not even sit up. (Right) Children are encouraged to play and explore. 

In Alice's words:

Zhengzhou is not the prettiest city. Its grey buildings are shrouded by a grey choking smoke. Henan is one of China’s poorer provinces and its capital reflects this. The Zhengzhou City Children’s Welfare Institute is located on the very outskirts of the city, where land is cheaper.

Despite being newly painted, the centre still did not look especially inviting from the outside, but we were welcomed warmly by Ma Jingya, who has been working as a teacher there for two years.

When we arrived, the twelve children in Bethel’s preschool initiative were taking an after lunch nap. We took this chance to look around one of the apartments they share, including a girl’s room, a boy’s room and a separate space for babies. The apartment looked very cosy with the kitchen and living room especially feeling like family homes. The only clue to the nature of the environment is stickers with children’s names and pictures to identify chairs, cups and toothbrushes.

Above: Baby room at the Zhengzhou orphanage.

The first child to wake was Xuerou. As I walked over to her cot I could see her yawning and smiling to herself. I whispered hello and she squealed with delight. Susan Ou, Bethel’s manager, told me she loves being talked to and cuddled. Xuerou is a child in whom they have seen the most significant changes since her arrival, very weak and malnourished.

Xuerou’s former circumstances are not known, but at first, she couldn’t even sit up or eat solid food, nor had she ever been taught how to walk or talk. It took six months of intensive care for her to respond to food and three years before she was able to stand. Now she is six, and can walk, but remains very small for her age. Susan told me that she understands when you tell her she is beautiful and will let you brush her hair.

Above: When Xuerou first arrived at age 4, she was very weak. She couldn’t sit up or eat any solid food. She now understands when you tell her that she is beautiful and she loves being cuddled and having her hair brushed.

I also spent a day with Gui Gui, a five year old boy who came into Bethel’s care at 18 months, after being abandoned by his parents. Gui Gui was expecting us but was feeling too shy to say hello. However, his shyness dissipated as soon as his Braille class started. The teacher, who is also blind, formed the children into a group to act out the Braille dots. Gui Gui was particularly quick and bossy, shouting out answers and physically putting the others in the correct place.

Gui Gui has transformed over the years, staff told me, from a terrified little boy who couldn’t walk or talk into the smiling bundle of energy I see today, who jumps downstairs in his haste to get to lunch. It wasn’t long before he was taking my hand and guiding me round his home.

He took particular interest in my camera, feeling his way around the buttons and the shutter. He would shout for his friends and the teacher and when he located them he would point the camera in their direction and push the shutter button in rapid succession as though firing a gun.

Gui Gui showed me one of his favorite places, the music room. He can play many instruments including the piano, which he asked me to play with him. When he realized I am not musical, he sat himself on my lap, took my hands in his and guided my fingers to the right keys to help me play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star — which is exactly what he is.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON MAPTIA

Text by Legatum Foundation

ALICE CARFRAE

@ACarfrae

Alice Carfrae is an English documentary photographer currently based in Beijing, China. She works for clients such as The Telegraph magazine, Ford Foundation, Legatum, The Welsh Ruby Union, the Youth Justice Board, and Billionaire.com.