In a recent article, UK newspaper 'The Daily Express,' claimed that the most common regret of people over sixty was not travelling and seeing more of the world. As such, it is really no wonder that travel has become an essential life experience for those in their twenties, especially in the western world. With an increasingly liberal world-view amongst the people of this generation, it is only natural that the popularity of overseas volunteer programs, and of 'voluntourism,' which combines both volunteer work and travel, is skyrocketing. But do these programmes do any good, or do some of them only serve to make volunteers feel better about themselves?
Influential French novelist, Gustave Flaubert, once said that, “Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” Surely even more humbling than travel itself, would be helping to improve the lives of the local people, or to help protect and preserve endangered animals and exotic ecosystems, as you go. It certainly sounds like a charitable, cheaper, and perhaps even more authentic way to see the world, and perhaps that is why it is so appealing for students. However, overseas volunteer programs receive a lot of criticism for several reasons. Some of the more significant arguments against them include their Eurocentric approach to indigenous populations, which fail to take into account their needs, traditions and cultures, and of existing as a “feel-good” alternative to travel – it feels rewarding, but ultimately makes no difference to the people it is supposed to help.
An aspiring traveller myself, I undertook an eight day volunteer program in the Fijian Yasawa Islands over the last summer. Advertised and arranged by STA Travel, the program was called Children & Schools, and was run by Vinaka Fiji. I found the program a great deal of fun. I met several other volunteers from various places around the world, from the US to Italy; one of my bunkmates was even a fellow Kiwi. We lived in traditional bures on the tiny island of Drawaqa, in Barefoot Island Resort, which hosts the volunteers and the marine conservation program. The island had vividly-coloured coral reefs within walking distance, which provided ample opportunities for snorkelling and scuba diving in our down time, and even surrendered glimpses of a few more impressive specimens, such as a two-metre wide manta ray I passed above as it was filter-feeding in the channel.
Every morning, the volunteers were taken to their placement via a little tin boat, on one of the multiple villages on the larger island to the north, Naviti. The precarious little dinghy only ran out of gas in the middle of the sea once, which was a huge plus, and the incessant heat meant the wade to shore was almost welcome. We ladies donned shirts that covered our shoulders, and sarongs that went down to mid-calf, while the boys wore either long shorts or a sulu, in order not to cause a stir in the more traditional villages. Despite the thirty plus degree heat, hats were not to be worn, as the head is sacred to the Fijian people, and wearing headgear while entering the village is seen as an affront to the chief. Fortunately for me, my volunteer program involved a lot of being indoors, as we first helped primary school kids with a one-on-one reading program, designed to help with their English. We also played board games and filled out worksheets, and during lunch hour, the kids picked us fruit and taught me a card game they all liked, which honestly made no sense to me, but that I constantly won thanks to my zealous instructors.
Sadly, the lack of government support and funding was very evident in the schools. There were entire blocks of buildings that were unusable; destroyed by tropical storms long since passed. The books in the libraries of the two schools I visited were donated by various charitable organisations or nearby resorts, and they were scarce at that. Still, our guide, an old woman called Tema, showed us what enormous progress the Vinaka Fiji programs had made to these schools.
Vinaka Fiji have three programs; children and schools, creating sustainable communities, and marine research and conservation, for which you are required to be a qualified scuba diver. The Vinaka Fiji Trust was established by the Awesome Adventures Company, who first made the Yasawas accessible to tourists. 'Vinaka' is the Fijian word for 'thank you,' and the trust was founded to give something back to the people of the Yasawas, to thank them for welcoming people from across the globe to their islands. The Yasawas are a small chain of volcanic islands, and though tranquil and idyllic in appearance, they are far from the veritable utopia that they appear to be. The islands are home to 27 villages that fall below the world poverty line, and there is a distinct lack of health services, available drinking water, and educational support and resources. As such, they are at great risk from natural disasters, like the recent Cyclone Winston, and recovery is slow, if it happens at all.
One of the things that is so wonderful about Vinaka Fiji's projects is that all of their programs have been developed in association with the local villages and their chiefs, or Turaga. This ensured that the activities both met the actual needs of the communities, as well as honouring and respecting their customs and way of life. These values are reflected in the results that the programs have had. Since the education program began, the pass rate for Yasawa High School students, once one of the most under-performing high schools in the country, has increased to 71 percent. Twenty-eight new water systems have also been installed across eleven villages, providing up to 212,000 litres of clean, drinking water, thanks to the sustainable communities program. Significant headway has been made by volunteers from the marine conservation program towards reducing the Crown of Thorns starfish population, which had reached plague-like numbers as a result of pollution from nearby sugar plantations and improper disposal of the creatures.
The voluntourism industry – the haphazard marriage between volunteering overseas and travelling – is worth around $173 billion dollars US every year. It sprung up in the wake of the ever-growing competition between not-for-profit businesses. These businesses are forced to walk a faltering line between fulfilling their philanthropic mission, and making enough money to be commercially viable.
White students from New Zealand, along with other western countries such as the US, Europe, and Australia, make up the prime demographic of those who undertake voluntourism projects. This fits with claims that volunteering overseas is “imperialist,” according to a recent article published by Andrew Hernann in Everyday Feminism – in response to observing many humanitarian organisations in African countries telling communities outright what they should and shouldn’t do. This fails to take into account the myriad of different cultural practices that they may be impeding, as well as implying that the native people have no idea how to take care of themselves – basically removing their autonomy and promoting the idea that they require “white-saviours” to come along and help them. “…Many foreign organisations are quite ignorant of the cultural, social, economic, and political lives of the peoples with whom they work,” Hernann claims, “Consequently, this marketing “justifies” non-collaborative humanitarianism because it depicts low-income communities as unable to speak and make decisions for themselves.”
This is not to say that there are not countless wonderful projects available throughout the world, but one has to be careful that for one thing, they are not imposing their own ideals on people who may not share or require them – missionary style – or that their project is actually helping them, rather than merely being a “feel-good” programme that doesn’t meet any of the actual needs of the community.
STA Travel’s UK-based global volunteering team have had a shake-up over the last couple of years, after deciding in 2014 that a number of the volunteer projects they were selling didn’t meet their standards, and weren’t providing the quality of service expected to either their program, or to the volunteers. The programmes they do offer are often selected for investigation after being recommended via word-of-mouth, and are then screened through customer and agent feedback, before eventually a representative from STA Travel will travel to the country itself. “…Our Contracts Manager for Volunteering has just returned from a two-week inspection visit of projects in India and Nepal. Once we have a project that we would like to offer to our volunteers, we then travel to that project and decide for ourselves if we would like to promote it through STA Travel,” a representative of the global volunteering team claimed.
In regards to what a project has to do in order to be offered by STA Travel, they have to meet some pretty strict criteria. “All of our volunteer projects have to read and sign the attached document before being sold within our company. This makes points, among others, that our volunteer suppliers have to show that their project is sustainable and that there are traceable benefits for the local community. We also make sure that a minimum of 10 percent of the cost paid by the volunteer is used as a cash donation (although this is usually much higher than 10 percent in most cases). We want the cost of volunteering to be as transparent as possible to reassure volunteers that their time, money and hard work are being used in the best way possible. We won’t sell any volunteering projects until this document has been read and signed by our suppliers.”
When recommending a program to a volunteer, STA Travel agents prefer to be able to recommend it based on their personal experience, as many of them will have visited or undertaken that project themselves, and the company have built up a relationship with the projects. “For example, we have a group of agents from the UK, Germany and Australia heading over to Fiji this month – due to the horrific cyclone that hit that part of the world earlier this year, our agents will not be undertaking a normal volunteer experience. Instead, they will be helping our volunteer partner and locals in rebuilding the village and helping out in any way they can after this natural disaster.”
If you are passionate about really making a difference by volunteering, you should ensure the travel agents trying to sell it to you have actually interacted with their volunteering partners, and that they thoroughly screen and have experienced both the hard work and incredible rewards of being a volunteer. If you choose to invest in a program without the middle-man, the ideal thing to do would be to investigate the program yourself by checking out reviews by other volunteers, whether it has had tangible benefits in the area it is trying to help, where exactly your money is going, and whether or not it is a Nigerian-Prince type scam. This last one is essential, not only to prevent yourself losing whatever meagre savings you have as a student, but to avoid getting stranded in some foreign land, kidnapped by pirates, or sold into slavery.
One of the things that my volunteering experience taught me is that, contrary to popular belief, it is definitely not the cheapest way to see the world. Don’t get me wrong, volunteering is great. You can make a real difference to communities across the world. However, you should probably make sure that you are actually making a difference, so that those rewarding feelings you get are justified – not just getting patted on the back whilst ignoring the real problems. Essentially, if you want to volunteer, you should volunteer, but if you’d prefer to travel, you should probably just travel.