Give and take

Volunteer tourism has become a way for scores of young people to not only experience another culture, but also do their part for disadvantaged communities. While some say ‘voluntourism’ trips to developing countries are expensive, poorly planned and unlikely to help local people, PhD student Simone Grabowski argues this growing trend proves an ultimately enriching experience.

Do you know someone who has spent more than several weeks in another country and come back ‘changed’ by their experience?

I did it myself in 2003, spending the year in Italy as part of my UTS International Studies degree. It opened up my eyes to the world and I returned to Australia fluent in two languages with a desire to pick up a third.

UTS graduate Clary Castrisson in India

Several weeks after I returned from my Italian jaunt, I enrolled in Intermediate Spanish and applied to go on exchange to Mexico for a semester. I was lucky UTS had several options for me to live and study overseas without having to put my degree on hold. At that stage in my life, I enjoyed immersing myself in a different culture and learning all that it had to offer.

While studying abroad is meaningful for the students who enjoy close cultural contact with the community, there are newer forms of long-stay tourism escalating in popularity in the travel choices of young students today.

They have been given many names, but I like to call them volunteer tourists: those who want more out of their holiday than hopping from one continent to the next. They are often on a quest for self-discovery as well as hoping to help ‘make a difference’.

Having been popular in the UK for several years now, the volunteer tourism industry is huge and growing worldwide. It involves Westerners working alongside local residents in less developed countries, living with families or in basic accommodation, often during their gap year (after their high school studies and before their university education begins). Their work ranges from simple tasks such as gardening or looking after livestock, to more complex assignments like teaching English and building schools.

There are thousands of organisations worldwide – private, charitable and government-run – which set up projects in developing countries and attract volunteers. As part of my doctoral thesis, I’m exploring the cross-cultural experiences of young volunteer tourists who travelled to Mexico, Costa Rica and Vanuatu with Youth Challenge Australia (YCA).

YCA, a non-government organisation operating out of UTS Kuring-gai campus, has been sending volunteers between the ages of 18 to 30 to remote areas since 1992 to help establish new community projects. The volunteers in my study worked on community education, conservation and construction projects for a period of six to 10 weeks.

UTS graduate Guy Havenstein in Tanzania

While the projects generally aim to assist a community in need, there is growing criticism in the media that volunteer tourism is more fad than function; that the community projects tend to do more harm than good.

The criticism is based on the goals of the organisation and the people they target. Private (and sometimes even government and charitable) organisations tend to place more importance on satisfying the volunteers rather than the community. The volunteers are often unskilled in the type of work they’re required to do and underprepared.

In some cases, the communities have been known to be left out of planning for their own development, denying them the opportunity to build their own skills. While this is a growing concern, the extent of the problem is unknown and therefore may not be a problem at all.

Other critics point to the growing trend for AIDS-orphan tourism in sub-Saharan Africa. Last year Professor Linda Richter, an academic from the Human Sciences Research Council of Durban, South Africa, and Amy Norman, a PhD student from Queen Mary, University of London, co-authored a paper condemning the activity as a ‘crisis of care’.

They argue that visiting volunteers are forming strong short-term bonds with African orphans, then leaving the children more vulnerable once they leave. They say these short-term attachments may worsen the known impacts of institutional care and commercial operators are the beneficiaries of such activities, not the community. 

My research goes beyond an examination of the volunteers and their experience in their project countries. I’m also interested in how the experience changes them in the six-month period upon their return.

While it’s common knowledge many travellers experience culture shock when they arrive at their destination, not as many are aware of the re-entry shock they may experience when returning home. Having myself experienced re-entry shock after returning from Italy, I thought it would be interesting to see how the international volunteer experience might affect the volunteer.

There are several theories which explain the experiences. One is that studying abroad produces a change in psyche, behaviour and identity. These changes can be predicted by several psychological, socio-cultural and demographic variables which include wellbeing, satisfaction, communication with the host community, length of trip, and values and attitudes of the traveller.

The initial results of my research show volunteers do go through a period of adjustment when returning home. Many of them go on to experience a significant life change, like breaking up with a long-term partner, and they usually attribute this to having had the time abroad to stop and think about life back home and how they would like it to change.

Volunteer tourism can prove to be a very important life lesson for a young person and is best done late in high school or at university, once enough education about development and community life is received. The volunteers from my study (all of them unskilled) felt valued by the community and the overall experience for them was positive and beneficial.

At this point, I can only guess volunteer tourism attracts a particular type of person. They have two things in common. The first is that they would like a change of scenery, whether this be to find out more about themselves, another culture or just to take a holiday. The second is that they would like to help others. I see these two things going hand in hand: volunteers tend to help others in order to help themselves.