Voluntourism is colonialism

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It is always an admirable objective to make a difference in the world. But if this comes at the cost of perpetuating oppression, you need to ask yourself some tough questions.

Specifically, voluntourism, or trips abroad to help people in “underdeveloped” countries, is wrong.

It’s wrong to spend money on an experience that benefits you under the guise of benefitting others. It costs a lot of money to fly to South America, to Africa or even to the poorer areas of North America. The flight, accommodations and program staff salaries add up to a significant amount of money. This is a sum that could be used by people that live in these areas to hire local people to do the same work, to lift each other out of poverty and empower themselves to create a sustainable livelihood.

Not only could the money be better used, but the act of travelling to “help” foreign people is dehumanizing to the very people who are the supposed object of this aid.

These trips perpetuate the notion that people in “underdeveloped” countries are helpless and inferior. It suggests that these people aren’t capable of training their own doctors and creating their own education systems. The premise of these trips is that westerners are best able to come up with culturally sensitive solutions to challenges that are predominantly a result of white imperialism.

This is insulting. There’s no way that a bunch of students spending one or two weeks somewhere for the first time can understand and appreciate the nuances of the challenges these people face better than people that have grown up and lived this reality.

To highlight the insult, the product of these trips seems to be a new Facebook profile picture, a page in your learning portfolio or a line on your resume. Taking a picture of yourself teaching impoverished children how to play soccer is exploitation, not something to be proudly displayed and “liked” by your friends.

The religious affiliation of many organizations that do development work in foreign countries makes me especially uncomfortable. Religion has been used as a tool to justify and perpetuate colonialism and this continues to this day. There is nothing inherently problematic about a religiously motivated desire to help others, but when this manifests as imperialism it needs to be questioned. For instance, it is not okay that foreign religious groups impose their beliefs and view indigenous spirituality as backwards or primitive. There is an inherent power imbalance between missionaries and people who are the beneficiary of this charity.

The one potential positive byproduct of voluntourism is that the voluntourists themselves will hopefully experience a profound paradigm shift. They will hopefully be humbled and realize that their privileged lifestyles exist at the expense of perpetuating global inequality. They will hopefully go back home and try to minimize their carbon footprint—recognizing that climate change disproportionately affects many of the world’s poorest areas. They will hopefully question the news they read and the way people around the world are othered.  They will hopefully begin to question why we label attacks on western nations as terrorism, but perpetual attacks of the same magnitude in Nigeria are ignored. These realizations are unambiguously good.

But the beneficiary of this good is the privileged person travelling to “help.” It is not the person that has no choice but to receive the charity.

Furthermore, whether this paradigm shift really needs to be brought about by a vacation masked as helping is debateable. Why not stay home and read some Fanon or Al-Afghani? Why not follow someone from that area on Twitter? Why not host a movie screening with your friends of The Passionate Eye, a documentary about the work conditions in China and Indonesia for Apple workers that make your iPhone? Why not use the money you would have spent travelling towards a micro-lending program or a self-directed organization?

I’m a firm proponent of making a difference in your community, both locally and in a broader sense. I think it’s especially admirable that hundreds of McMaster students have engaged with MacServe in the Hamilton community (although I question the money spent on t-shirts).

But McMaster should question the way our institution supports voluntourism in the form of the MacServe reading week and summer trips. The organizations that are associated with these trips vary, and while some are certainly more progressive, others like Camp Restore where participants going to New Orleans stay have an explicitly religious agenda.

It’s important to acknowledge that I’m writing this as a privileged, white person; I’m not the first to make this criticism and I hopefully won’t be the last. We need to call voluntourism what it is—colonialism. It’s not okay to treat some humans as inferior beings that need help. It’s not okay to condescendingly step into the lives of others for a brief moment only to grab a few quick pictures and leave without caring about the long term impact, or lack of impact. Keep your desire to help others, nurture it with knowledge and do something actually productive.

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