What are ALL voluntourists good at?
In recent years Voluntourism it has gotten a bad name. There are a lot of valid reasons that people have been turned off by voluntourism, including:
- voluntourism’s potential to foster colonialist attitudes and cause harmful side effects (as in Illich’s thoughts on Peace Corps)
- projects which place unskilled foreign travelers in jobs requiring skilled laborers or taking away local jobs
- short term interactions with children without proper child protection policies (Some argue that English teaching is a great way to engage English-speaking travelers in volunteer work, and perhaps sometimes it is, but I feel that even this is not always a good fit. Often times native speakers know the language, but are not trained teachers and repeated short-term interactions can have harmful side effects for children.)
- volunteer placement agencies charging exorbitant fees from their overseas offices with little to no money reaching the development projects themselves (no need to link to a lot of them for examples, just google “volunteer abroad”!)
These reasons are some of the reasons that I too am skeptical Continue Reading