“Travel this summer with [International Student Volunteers (ISV)],” reads the multicoloured chalk letters on the brick walls of the Unicentre.
Melanie Moller, a second-year journalism student at Carleton, did just that. But the picture of volunteering that was painted for Moller was much different than what she saw when she arrived in Puyo, Ecuador in May.
After reading her assigned project, which was to work in an animal rehabilitation centre, Moller said she was under the impression she’d be helping the animals back to a state where they could be released into the wild.
This wasn’t the reality Moller said she saw at the centre.
“[It was] immediately evident that these animals were in no way ready to be back in the wild,” she said. “The entire purpose of re-release is to get the animals to the point where they are aggressive and fearful of humans.”
“I don’t feel like I helped at all,” Moller added. “If I had expected to make a huge difference, I would have been disappointed.”
Moller said she saw a coati, a raccoon-like animal, pressing itself against its cage so it could be scratched behind the ears. In essence, Moller said she was “babysitting animals.”
Internationally inclined?
ISV is an organization that sends paying students to countries like Ecuador, New Zealand, South Africa, Australia, and Thailand to work on local projects. It’s one of many organizations and non-profits that are sending North American volunteers overseas on what some call voluntourism trips.
Simon Costain is ISV’s international marketing and recruiting director. He said he’s aware of the two-week volunteer program’s limitations and the marketing techniques they use.
There are challenges associated with getting students involved in international volunteer programs, he said, including balancing their expectations of fun with the more realistic demands of the local projects.
He used students who want to volunteer in Australia as an example.
“They want to hug koalas and kangaroos,” he said, noting that the actual benefits of these types of programs are minimal.
“The reality is that most of them are working on conservation projects, pulling weeds and planting trees.”
Moller’s voluntourism trip lasted five weeks, including a two-week stint volunteering at the animal rehabiltation centre, one week of cultural immersion programs, and two weeks of the tourism aspect of the trip, which included activities like kayaking and bungee jumping.
Moller said she enjoyed the final portion of the trip, which was the reason her parents allowed her to participate in the ISV program in the first place.
Costain said educatiing these students about the reality of their programs is challenging.
“How do we get people excited about [the program], yet paint an accurate picture of what they’ll be doing when they arrive?”
An alternative route
There are other problems with short-term volunteer programs, something that Daniela Papi, co-founder of Promoting Education, emPowering Youth Rides, (PEPY Rides) and Protect the Earth, Protect Yourself Tours (PEPY Tours), is familiar with.
Papi first started volunteering overseas in 2003 when she travelled with Habitat for Humanity to Nepal, the Philippines and Papua New Guinea. She said her view on international volunteering changed after an educational bike trip across Japan.
While on the bike trip, after an exhausting day, the group stopped at a school and was asked to paint it, according to Papi. The group did a quick job and moved on, but she said she wondered if local workers could have done a better job.
Papi said this was the moment she began opposing the concept of “changing the world in a week.”
Papi said she wants to change the idea of a volunteer vacation, where students pay large sums of money to travel to a foreign country and help build a school or teach kids during the day, then be free to explore and party at night.
It was this mindset that pushed Papi to open PEPY Tours. It was meant to be a new and different way for people to travel and volunteer, but the organization started with just six volunteers who organized the first trip in 2005.
PEPY Tours began as a voluntourism trip, much the same as the ones Papi now critiques.
“We tried to make it slightly better and then we realized we had to make it completely different,” Papi said.
The organization’s goal, as stated on their website, is to offer travellers a chance to learn from the people and programs that their funding supports, and to inspire these travellers to realize their own potential to create positive change.
The second and main branch of the organization, PEPY Ride, focuses on literacy, leadership and education programs, Papi said. PEPY Ride is now run by 47 staff members.
Differing perspectives
Papi said she wished to break free of the “moral imperialism” she said plagues many other volunteer development organizations and the “because I am a foreigner I can teach someone” mentality.
She said she believes people shouldn’t take a hero approach to development and believe that having a privileged economic position qualifies them for aid work.
“People ask whether the locals should be involved, and I think ‘hell yes’ they should be! I think the real question is ‘should foreigners be involved?”
Shannon Benn, a second year concurrent education student at the University of Toronto, said she agrees students shouldn’t view themselves as heroes. In 2009, Benn volunteered for a two-week trip to Uganda with Give International, a Canadian charitable trust organization. She said she found the other volunteers often took the stance that they were there to save the day.
But Benn said she disagreed. “I don’t feel like it takes a special person to go on these trips,” Benn said.
But not all organizations see the long-term development aspect of voluntourism as the sole purpose for these programs. An important part of ISV’s mandate, for example, is to include students in these programs, despite the limitations this may present.
“It’s a real mix,” Costain said. “We’re one of the only organizations whose focus is mostly on students.”
ISV, he said, believes that if an organization can offer students positive international volunteer experiences, they, in turn, come back better global citizens.
“This two-week volunteer experience can spark a whole chain of events in their lives.”
