Young Tie Up the Lion

An Insight Into Voluntourism
1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4835-8467-6
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 196 Seiten

Thinking of travelling the world or volunteering abroad? You might soon become one of the millions of people who participate in 'Voluntourism' every year. The unregulated sector is becoming increasingly popular with young, Western backpackers seeking to make a positive contribution to the world around them. Well meaning voluntourists spend time in the poorest countries in the world building schools, digging wells and teaching English under the auspice of 'making a difference'. But does their involvement actually do more harm than good? Tie Up The Lion explores how young people's motivations to 'save the world' often have alarming, unforeseen negative consequences on the lives of the very people they're trying to help. Some voluntourists unwittingly become involved in placements that exploit children, line the pockets of unscrupulous for profit companies and wreak havoc across local communities. This book will help you to avoid such placements and discover positive, impactful ways in which you can contribute to the world around you.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Young, Ross

Leseproben

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What is Voluntourism?

“I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve”

Albert Schweitzer

We all probably know of someone who has volunteered in a developing country, possibly because it’s all they ever talk about at parties, at dinners or even when you’re having a quiet beer in the local on a Friday night. They will ream off story after story about their experiences in Laos and how it has changed their life. They might tell you how fortunate you are to have a flushing toilet in the pub, or that you can stumble into the Chinese takeaway on your way home to get a delicious meal, without having to spend the afternoon in your garden digging up your own vegetables.

You will sit there, politely nodding and smiling, wondering how much more of it you will have to endure before you can start talking about something else. You might at first have thought that the experience your friend or acquaintance had was unique — that they were the one person within your group of friends that was trying to make a positive contribution to the wider world. But in reality, their experience was just a drop in the ocean of global volunteering activity.

Volunteer Tourism: A Global Analysis, a comprehensive report published back in 2008 about the global patterns of tourists wishing to volunteer in different parts of the world, estimates that 1.6 million people get involved in some form of volunteer tourism every year.1 The financial value of the sector is staggering, and the same report suggests that it is worth between £832m and £1.3billion.2 Less conservative and more recent statistics suggest that the youth travel and tourism industry could be worth in excess of US$173 billion each year, and it is estimated that this exorbitant figure is only going to continue to grow.3 Anyone that has ever spent time in a developing or lower income country, regardless of statistics, will be very aware that there are multitudes of young people spending time away from home and are contributing to the phenomenal growth rate of this particular sector.

In the modern age of budget international travel and the increasing accessibility to every continent in the world, people have started to broaden their horizons and visit places that may have seemed alien just twenty years ago. According to a report by Demos in 2011, it is approximated that there are just short of 100 organisations that offer specialist voluntourism opportunities to young people, placing in the region of 50,000 young people in ninety countries across the world every single year.4 Go Overseas, an online platform for discovering ‘meaningful’ volunteering opportunities abroad, provides people with access to nearly 900 organisations who provide over 2400 international volunteer programs, the majority of which charge volunteers a fee to join the programme.

According to Go Overseas, the three places in the world that attract the most interest in terms of online searches are The Philippines, India and Thailand. According to their search engines, Asia is the most searched for continent for people looking to spend time volunteering abroad, potentially due to the diversity of volunteering programmes on offer, as well as the favourable climate and access to exciting leisure opportunities at the disposal of travellers in the region.5 Essentially, volunteering opportunities exist in pretty much every continent in the world, and there are a whole host of organisations that are on hand to help you find them.

At this early stage, I think it is vital that I inform you of what I mean when I use the term voluntourism. From a linguistic perspective, the term is simply a blend of two easily understood words in the English language of volunteer and tourism. Voluntourism, therefore, is an amorphous and ambiguous concept, and its very essence breeds controversy and debate. It’s a hybrid term that combines two very separate entities: volunteering and tourism, terms that historically wouldn’t have come into much contact with one another. If we take these two entities into isolation, volunteering can be defined as ‘any activity that involves spending time, unpaid, doing something that aims to benefit the environment or someone (individuals or groups) other than, or in addition to, close relatives. Central to this definition is the fact that volunteering must be a choice freely made by each individual.’6 Tourism, on the other hand, can be defined as ‘a collection of activities, services and industries which deliver a travel experience comprising transportation, accommodation, eating and drinking establishments, retail shops, entertainment businesses and other hospitality services provided for individuals or groups traveling away from home.’7

In isolation, as can be read from the two definitions, volunteering and tourism represent completely different industries, concepts and acts, and to a certain extent combining the two terms is oxymoronic. Volunteering is an act of giving your time for free to provide a service or to help someone or something out in some way. Tourism is the collective term for services and products that an individual usually pays for to spend their time during their travels away from home.

When brought together, we could assume that voluntourism represents giving your time for free in a country away from home, whilst paying for services and products that enrich your travelling experience. But the hybrid term of voluntourism also carries a hatful of connotations, many negative, others positive. As a standalone term, it has been defined in many different ways by different people and organisations, and often the definitions are loaded with subjective views that encourage people to think in one way or another about the actual act of being a volunteer and a tourist at the same time, with less focus on what a voluntourist is, with more interest in what a voluntourist is perceived to do.

To exemplify the variety of definitions of voluntourism circulating online, I have provided you with the five that I have come across that I find the most striking and pertinent. Firstly, and as is always a safe place to start, The Collins English Dictionary defines voluntourism as ‘tourism in which travellers do voluntary work to help communities or the environment in the places they are visiting.’8As well as being relatively simplistic, this definition is particularly subjective, with the implication being that the work that the tourist is doing is actually helping the community that they are visiting. As we will learn later, this is very often not the case, but this is a pervading viewpoint particularly amongst younger people who elect to volunteer abroad.

The folks over at Responsible Travel Report go one step further in their positive subjectivity, in defining voluntourism as a process that ‘involves travelling to a place to improve economic well-being, socio-cultural development, or environmental conservation by providing volunteer assistance and/or goods.’9 This definition pretty much pits voluntourism in the same industry as international development professionals and suggests that voluntourists provide humanitarian assistance to communities in different parts of the world. It is unfounded to suggest that voluntourists can improve economic well-being and assist in socio-cultural development, given the simple fact that voluntourism exists in so many different forms. Such a grandiose claim, I would argue, places extremely high value on the work that voluntourists carry out and adds to the perception of some that voluntourists are ‘saving the world’.

One more definition from the positive camp is presented by K. Tomaszos in his 2010 paper on volunteer tourism, in which he defines the concept as ‘the practice of individuals going on a working holiday, volunteering their labour for worthy causes [including] aiding or alleviating the material poverty of some groups in society; the restoration of certain specific environments or research into aspects of society or environment for various reasons.’10 Once again, Tomaszos is bold in his suggestion that the voluntourist is firstly participating in a cause that is ‘worthy’, but also that there is an element of humanitarianism about the participation in a voluntourism project, that is likely to improve the lives of people that benefit from the person’s involvement in the programme.

Given that voluntourists do not necessarily possess a specific skill set, it is unfair to assume that their labour will naturally make a positive contribution to the lives of the people that they will be working alongside. Moreover, there have been some cases highlighted in the international media, particularly those involving some orphanages in South-East Asian countries, where voluntourists have worked in far from worthy projects (through no fault of their own it has to be said), and again it is slightly misleading to suggest that all causes that receive the help of voluntourists are worthy.

If we head to the other end of the spectrum (which appears on the very same page of my Google search incidentally), The Urban Dictionary defines voluntourism in the following,...