Voluntourism

Very slow and boring day today.  I woke up early, but Max and his friends were gone to Maadi and Lizz off to church and then a school-related Fourth of July party.  So I spent the large bulk of the day sitting around reading Virgina Woolf’s To The Lighthouse.  All of Max’s friends are sick tonight – digestive issues – so we just ordered food and took it easy.  I sort of wanted to go get kunafa, but time got away from me and I never ended up going.

The only exciting news of the day is that my friend Iris, who works for the Wall Street Journal in Asia and who I visited this past spring, had a story published that she had been working on forever.  Several months ago, when I was in Hong Kong, she was already trying to get her idea – to do a story on the phenomenon of ‘voluntourism,’ wherein peopel go on vacation and volunteer – was slowly making its way through the Journal process.  Getting the story through the process and published was difficult and caused her a lot of stress, so I’m really happy to finally see it.  It’s not online anywhere that I can find, at least not the long Asian version (it was published in this weeks US Weekend Journal as well), so here it is in full until the Journal’s lawyers yell at me:

WEEKEND JOURNAL
Travel: Goodwill globe-trotting — New ways for tourists to give back
By Iris Kuo in Luang Prabang, Laos and Geoffrey A. Fowler in Siem Reap, Cambodia
1356 words
4 July 2008
The Wall Street Journal Asia
W8
English
(c) 2008 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. To see the edition in which this article appeared, click here http://awsj.com.hk/factiva-ns

Libby Shearon was looking for escape and cultural exchange when she paid $1,500 to help build a children’s center in Sri Lanka. Instead, she says, she spent three weeks arguing with local staff and laborers over how to execute the project.

“It was a total culture shock,” the 65-year-old London resident recalls. She struggled with what she felt was the dismissive attitude of local people toward her, and says she couldn’t shake a gnawing sense that her work was simply “tokenism.” The children’s center was built, but Ms. Shearon concluded: “I should’ve just gone on a real holiday.”

The type of travel experience Ms. Shearon took part in is what’s called voluntourism, an increasingly popular travel option in which tourists combine volunteer work with a trip to an exotic locale. Too often, though, neither the well-intentioned visitor nor the local community actually benefits from the encounter. The good news: Several organizations around the world are taking a new tact. They’re designing ways for tourists to just be tourists — and still help the communities they’re visiting.

Unlike many traditional voluntourism programs, which can often stretch for weeks and be pretty intense — like a six-week penguin rescue program in South Africa that involves catching and cleaning up after the birds — the new model for charitable tourism calls for tourists to only spend a few hours on an endeavor.

Vacationers “are looking for more-rewarding experiences,” says Daniel Ford, a spokesman for Ritz-Carlton Co., which in April launched a program in its hotels around the world called “Give Back Getaways,” through which its guests can participate in local half-day volunteer programs. In Beijing, Ritz-Carlton guests can spend a day with a translator at Dongba Village Learning Center, where they meet children of migrant workers and help finish a mural in the school library. The guests, who each make a $100 donation to the program, get to do things the usual tourist doesn’t get a chance to do, says Mr. Ford.

As the popularity of traditional voluntourism programs has grown over recent years, so has the chorus of critics: London watchdog group Tourism Concern, for instance, criticizes the wisdom of dispatching unskilled volunteers for stints so short they’re just disorienting for the visitor. The group also questions projects where voluntourists displace locals on routine work “as if local people weren’t able to cook things or clean things or teach,” says director Tricia Barnett.

Aiming to avoid such criticism, a growing number of charities and tour groups are reverting to the idea that tourists should stick to being tourists. Groups that want to funnel aid to poor communities now are appealing first to visitors’ desire for a good vacation experience ahead of their work ethic and sense of sympathy, figuring that will make for steady tourism income over the long term.

On tours to Lhasa, Tibet, luxury travelers with high-end tour group Abercrombie & Kent can opt to spend a day at Braille Without Borders, a live-in school for blind children, some of whom have been abused or abandoned. Tourists aren’t expected to learn to read Braille or consider adopting an abandoned child, but they are often inspired to make a donation. One traveler on a recent trip was so moved by the experience she flew the group’s director from Tibet to Kerala, the Indian state where she’s from, to help set up a similar program there.

Another program called Stay Another Day, run by the International Finance Corp. arm of the World Bank, steers tourists via a Web site and booklets to pre-evaluated activities that benefit a local community. At the Vientiane, Laos, visitors’ center for the Mines Advisory Group, a charity that Britain’s Princess Diana supported, tourists can learn how landmines work and how clearance teams remove them. For a small donation, MAG gives out T-shirts that bear the aiming instructions found on real landmines: “Front towards enemy.”

Tourists come to these programs to “experience the destination in a richer and more meaningful way,” says Kate Lloyd-Williams, the director of the Stay Another Day program, which charges charities to be listed. “There are many good charities, but they don’t have anything interesting that a tourist can come and do and experience. We have to start with the principle of: Is there anything to offer the tourist?” says Ms. Lloyd-Williams, the program’s director.

In other cases, tourists actually provide a service. A Luang Prabang literacy program called Big Brother Mouse operates a community center where monks and other locals can practice their English with visiting tourists. Jodie Lambert, a 23-year-old Australian, on a recent morning swapped sentences about sunglasses and tattoos with an orange-robed novice monk named Mone. “If I could get a tattoo, I would get one here,” Mone said, gesturing to his forearms, drawing a laugh from Ms. Lambert.

Personal experiences like this made Ms. Lambert feel like she was traveling off-the-beaten-sightseeing path. “I’m not just a typical tourist,” says Ms. Lambert. “I’m doing something a bit more worthwhile.”

The center also publishes inexpensive children’s books in English and Lao. Tourists are invited to buy them, at a cost of $1 to $3 each, and distribute them to children, teachers and others as they travel around Laos. Sam Afridi, an American who works for a nonprofit organization in Switzerland, did just that one recent day in Luang Prabang. “A book would go so much further than a bar of Snickers” as a treat for kids, Mr. Afridi said. He walked out with 34 books he planned to give to children during his travels.

Voluntourists also need to consider whether their money is ending up in the right hands. One rule of thumb: truly sustainable organizations should be employing local staff who have a chance to advance, according to a guide issued by the National Geographic Society, which aims to educate what it calls “geotourists” who want to travel ethically. Programs should also capitalize on authentic cultural assets such as rituals, architecture and cuisines, and educate tourists in how to enjoy those assets without damaging them.

For their part, traditional voluntourism operators say they can accomplish these same aims — albeit with longer stays. Mark Hintzke, who runs a two-week program for voluntourists to restore temples in Nepal, says he decided to tap tourists as a funding source because grant money was scarce. The $2,500 fee he charges visitors covers accommodations, and also helps pay for a local architect and local laborers. Voluntourists spend half of each day with monks building walls or cleaning paintings, and afternoons sightseeing. “It seemed natural that we take tourism dollars that were flowing into the country anyway and redirect them,” Mr. Hintzke says.

The best thing about the way voluntourism is evolving, supporters say, is that sometimes the tourists don’t even realize they are doing good deeds. Take, for instance, Donna Sharpless, a 50-year-old teacher from Florida, and her 56-year-old companion, Charley Williams, who visited Luang Prabang in May. Ms. Sharpless says the couple relied on the Stay Another Day booklet they picked up at their hotel to plan most of their activities — and didn’t even realize that all of them were charitable endeavors. “We’ve just been using it as a guidebook,” Ms. Sharpless says.

Among other things, the couple rode elephants at an out-of-town camp for animals rescued from the local logging industry. Fees of $69 a person for a one-day tour go toward care of the animals. At first, Mr. Williams says, he worried about being snared in a tourist trap. But in the end, he says, the experience was “good for the actual program and good for us.”