For our long-term volunteers, we do indeed look to match skills with needs, as those with good matches are the most successful internships. Typically, with our programs as well, the majority of applicants are young recent college graduates who have less expertise than we would be looking for in one taking an advisory or capacity building role, though we do occasionally find those people. For those with more general skills, we are able to benefit from their English fluency, writing skills, and business acumen to help improve the systems of how our office runs, to communicate with people who are interested in PEPY, and to manage our newsletters/Web 2.0 communication.

For short term visitors (a few weeks or less), we instead offer paid tours (www.pepytours.com). These tours are typically not volunteer experiences, they are tours of Cambodia, which have a required fundraising fee above and beyond the costs and which provide a chance for travelers to go where their money goes to learn about the projects they are financially supporting. In this way, the long term volunteers and their skills are matched to multiply the impact of their time while short term visitors are providing the majority of their impact through their money.

One thought I have: we are all aware that we should prevent communities from becoming dependent on volunteers, but I think it is important to try to prevent our organizations from being reliant on funding from volunteers as well. I have struggled with this myself and find that if there is someone or some project that I want to say “no, sorry, that is NOT what we want to do here” – I need to make sure that I do indeed say that rather than thinking about their money and saying yes. This has sparked some reflections which maybe I will put into a further post. Thank you!

I agree with Daniela that it’s not the same as sending an English teacher. In this case people will be there to share their ideas, knowledge and experience but in the end it will be up to the tour operator and the community to chose whether to adopt them or not, so their impact can be carefully controlled. However, having said that, it doesn’t mean there aren’t risks involved. Though each tourist is good at being a tourist, that doesn’t mean they are attune to issues and considerations in Cambodia/that specific project/community involved/etc. A marketing expert from a Conglomerate Inc. does not necessarily know what’s best for a small homestay in rural Cambodia.

It is the responsibility of the tour operator to work together with the community to filter through the tourists’ advices/initiatives to insure the proper fit to that specific situation. The purpose should be to put many minds together from diverse backgrounds not to leave tourists in charge of solving all of the local community’s issues.

With the growth of voluntourism, we are getting more interest from people who want short-term stays, sometimes as little as a week. We recognize that the benefit to the community from short term unskilled volunteers is not anywhere close to that of the long term skilled volunteers. However, working in a very disadvantaged community, we require the funding that short term visitors contribute to the operation of the NGO.

Our recent challenge has been to develop a way for short term volunteers to make a meaningful contribution and feel good about what they are doing while not creating dependency within the community. The bulk of our first volunteers were trained medical professionals, social workers and teachers who stayed for weeks or months. Now, it seems the bulk of our future volunteers will be university students who will stay for less than a month.

We have Peruvian staff who manage the volunteers and are key players in the community. We trust their guidance and leadership when it comes to the projects these short term volunteers take on. They know the community’s needs and how to best use the volunteers based on their individual skills and interests.

Our primary goal with the short term volunteers is to turn them into advocates for volunteer travel and to help us continue to support the NGO and the community they worked for. Most of our volunteers come to us through word of mouth (since we lack the funds to advertise like the big companies) and having 10 short term volunteers return home and spread their story is certainly good for everyone. It brings us more volunteers, more funding, and a greater awareness of the challenges faced by people in the developing world.

I really believe that international travel will eventually lead us to a peaceful future without poverty, and volunteer travel – even short trips – is essential to realizing that.

I agree with you on the negative impacts (and very few positive impacts – outside of tourist’s own warm fuzzies) of short term child teaching projects or orphanage visits, etc. Here, we refer to those as “pet the children” trips, as the bus tours to orphanages seem a lot more like trips to the zoo than mutually respectful human interactions, especially in the cases when financial support is going to the tour companies or corrupt groups (post on orphanage tourism coming soon as a group of friends and I are fed up with the corruption surrounding orphanage tourism in Cambodia and we want more people to be aware of these issues).

As for Illich’s piece, I clearly don’t agree with it all or I wouldn’t be working in development in Cambodia. I do though think everyone who goes abroad “to help”, myself included, should read it. Even if we don’t agree completely or at all with his point of view, I think it is so important to know that his point of view EXISTS, and reflect on the reasons why it might. For me, it serves as a good reminder that just because some foreigners have higher formal education than the people in the communities they are visiting does not mean we can come in and teach. We have to learn first. I know this, as PEPY Tours started as “we are here to teach you about the environment” tours, when we clearly knew very little about the Cambodian environment and the communities we were working in.

I appreciate your comments re:Peace Corps, and as I said, I surely want to clarify that I don’t agree with all Illich has to say, or I couldn’t do the work I’m doing. His use of the word “invade” is clearly biased, and not at all how the Peace Corps intends to be viewed.

In a place like Cambodia, where America had little interest in resources until oil was found off-shore here a few years ago, an observer watching the US officially give money directly to the Cambodian government for the first time since UNTAC, bring in the Navy for the first time to hand out gifts in port, bring in Fulbright, and also the Peace Corps, all within a very short time frame post-oil discovery, could in a some ways, view that as an “invasion”. I’m not saying I do, nor am I saying any of those groups and their individual motives are wrong, but sometimes it is good to put ourselves in the shoes of a local person looking at all that is being brought into their country, even if their politicians invited it in, and to think what questions/assumptions/accusations we might have had, as Illich did. We might disagree with them or him, but the act of reflecting on why they might feel that way can only help us improve our actions, in my opinion.

Thanks for commenting, and please continue to do so when you feel moved to!