Voluntourism - Soloff

The Zakaria and Stupart articles touch on a few reasons why volunteer tourism, while seemingly altruistic and good at first glance, can be flawed (sometimes inherently, and sometimes fixable). All arguments orbit around the idea that the volunteer tourism “industry” exists to “help” the volunteer by making them feel better rather than actually help the target, or otherwise use the selfish desires of the volunteers to fuel actual helping of the targets. One argument focuses on efficiency of helping those in need; an unskilled young college student may just be in the way and slow down work, and giving their money to local organizations may help more but the volunteer may not be as motivated to donate if they are not hands-on. Another addresses the fact that “orphan hugging” programs both create a market for orphans, duping voluntourists and screwing over the children involved, and also wouldn’t be a good thing to do regardless (due to a lack of background checks and not establishing long-term care for the orphans). A third argument states that many volunteer projects do something that sounds good, like building a library or painting a school, but that don’t actually contribute to the long-term welfare and success of the community as a whole.

Although all of the smaller individual arguments are complicated issues, I feel as though they can be addressed to some extent. The efficiency one is the hardest; similarly to the global aid issue, how can people be encouraged to give their support/money more without crossing similar ethical boundaries (and in this case, without physically going there and making things worse). I agree with the articles that the “orphan hugging” programs are inherently flawed, and do indeed create a market for orphans, and that ultimately real orphans are a problem that should not be addressed by foreign aid or volunteers but by a country/state itself. Finally, although many projects are short-sighted failures that don’t address long term concerns of a community, I think (and the authors seem to agree) that this is a problem that can be circumvented through proper education of circumstances as well as utilization of the local community’s tools, workers, and long-term needs. All of these issues aside, the core idea, that of volunteer tourism existing as a way for westerners to masturbate their egos, needs to be talked about because it plays a hand in every smaller argument as well. Do we have an obligation to (intelligently) help others, whether we like it or not, like Singer says? Is it wrong for someone to volunteer to feel good about themselves if they do just as much good as a selfless volunteer (intent vs. consequence)? These are versions of questions that we’ve tried to answer all year, but they are difficult to pin down and hopefully brought up during class.