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Group of us volunteers in Brazil
Global Girl’s Perspectives on Voluntourism:
Yesterday a great group of researchers working with Bianca Freire-Medeiros interviewed me yesterday about my experience with voluntourism. Two questions stuck out as being really thought provoking.
When you say, voluntourism can “open up your eyes,” open up your eyes to what?
She also asked me if I felt some sort of repercussion for the fact that I came all the way to Brazil to participate in voluntourism, however I was living in a city (New Orleans) that was also needing a lot of volunteers. I said that I didn’t feel guilty, because I was participating in rebuilding New Orleans. I went out and gutted houses, I worked to rebuild the city in a more environmentally aware way, and I moved back and supported the city economically.
Reading this article from an interesting women, Alexia Nestora, (and a new person to follow on Twitter!) who worked directly with voluntourism programs wrote an article about a foundation, Farther Foundation, that picks people from lower income housing and gives them the opportunity to volunteer abroad. This gave me another reason why voluntourism can be really beneficial.
When you are living in your world, in your day to day life, it is almost harder to look beyond the four walls of your own life and see what is going on all around you. When volunteering abroad in a different culture, every experience is vivid. You are really aware of your surroundings, because everything is new. After volunteering abroad and really paying attention to the surroundings and all the aspects that occur daily that directly or indirectly affect the lives inside one’s own “personal four walls,” helps that person become more aware of these aspects in their own life. This person can then go back to their own culture and compare their new experience with their home life, and maybe even motivate that person to change daily aspects of their home life in order to have positive benefits on their own community. Maybe that is what I mean when I say, “Voluntourism can open up your eyes.”
Have any of you participated in “Voluntourism?” Did it “open your eyes?” If so, how did it open them, and to see what? I’d love to know what you all think!
I highly agree that sometimes voluntourism has a huge downside. I see this for two reasons.
1)Sometimes highly motivated and confident voluntourists get to a project in another culture and think that they are going to jump in and change everything for the better. This is a great desire, but a little elitist without even knowing it. Sometimes the projects are even really successful, and they don’t really have a place for the volunteer. Or the projects don’t have the resources to organize the volunteer, and volunteers don’t understand it takes huge resources to organize them.
2)The language and culture barrier are huge. I know that when I volunteered in Rio de Janeiro, I kept getting frustrated that I wasn’t given clear tasks and I wasn’t “doing” anything. I realized that they wanted me to participate and observe and understand before they could really let me do something. What did I, little American college girl know about this photography project in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. (I wrote a post about this, and you can see it here http://tinyurl.com/l25yoe).
I agree with you also on the time issue. After my experience, I believe that at least a year is needed to actually make an impact, because for the first 4-6 months is just getting used to the culture, language, and project.
With all that said, voluntourism did open up my eyes. I have continued learning about and working with the issues that I learned and experienced from my volunteering experience. I think it opened up my eyes to not only life in Rio and Brazil, but also my life back in the states.
When I was literally volunteering, did it make an impact on the project? No, probably not. But step by step, it made an impact.