I STILL sing the praises of the Peace Corps Participatory Analysis for Community Action manual and this is why. Sustainability and needs assessment, needs assessment, needs assessment. Cheap, effective, and empowering. If youre willing to listen and build trust, people love talking about their communities, their histories, their strengths and weaknesses, and their dreams for the future. america.aljazeera/opinions/2014/4/volunter-tourismwhitevoluntouristsafricaaidsorphans.html As admirably altruistic as it sounds, the problem with voluntourism is its singular focus on the volunteer’s quest for experience, as opposed to the recipient community’s actual needs. For example, Dorinda Elliot, a contributing editor at the Condé Nast Traveler website, writes about a “failed voluntourism project” in Haiti — a set of houses built by an American church. Buoyed by the imagined nobility of their endeavor, the builders failed to consider the needs of the would-be inhabitants. The uneducated families that moved into the houses lacked professional skills and employment to improve their conditions and continued to beg for food long after the tourists left. A community directed approach, instead of a tourist-determined one, would have invested in helping the families develop skills necessary to tackle their primary need, poverty. Despite its flaws, the educational aspect of voluntourism’s cross-cultural exchange must be saved, made better instead of being rejected completely. Natalie Jesionka, a columnist at the Daily Muse, offers future voluntourists some direction on making a real impact on their trips. She emphasizes the need for the volunteer to adapt to the culture, to be flexible, relevant and realistic. In addition to fostering mutual understanding, this would create less-domineering, nonjudgmental volunteers who are not obsessed with the pursuit of the emotional highs (and photo ops) of the altruism they paid for. It would also enable the dislocation of the stereotype that finds need and want in other and exotic places by revealing the same dimensions within their own locales and the connections between the marginalized of here and the excluded of there.
Posted on: Wed, 25 Jun 2014 21:00:23 +0000
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