To dislike this type of tourism?

[CatastropheKate]

Have just seen this on facebook which gives me the irrational rage.

Day 2 The Dump - we went to visit a community who live next to a landfill site. We split up into groups and gave out water and fruit to them. A boy call Jose came and joined us to help he beamed with delight when he gave the things to the people he knew. He kept trying out some of the English words he has learnt and I got him to teach me the Spanish. We met a lovely lady who runs a shop and try's to help the people living there. We prayed with a guy who told us he was drinking again after managing to give up. He said that he was finding life tough and this has caused his relapse. Opening up to us cannot have been easy. The young people were really shocked by the bleak conditions in which they lived and found it hard to get their heads around how children could be brought up there.
We finished the day with games and some time thinking about what we saw today.

It's by a group of kids that made their parents friends pay for their holidays by organising coffee mornings etc. I get that the kids have new exciting experiences and can pad out their cv, but to pretend it's for charity and spend it on airfares and 'games' is a bit much. And asking your imaginary friend to help is really taking things too far.

Flopjust agree with you. There is a lot of "othering" that goes on even when one is standing next to someone whose situation is so different to one's own.

And the situation with orphanages is terrible. Even aside from the children effectively performing for tidbits, there is also the issue of traumatised children with highly insecure attachments being subjected to the untrained ministrations of a succession of well meaning strangers who stay with them for perhaps only a matter of weeks.

Buffet I think that volunteering especially with vulnerable groups is better regulated in the UK. Good point about self interest - I guess we all do everything we do out of self interest, ultimately.

I think for volunteering to work there has to be as you say a skills match but also proper training and support for the volunteers themselves.

It's by a group of kids that made their parents friends pay for their holidays by organising coffee mornings etc

Are coffee mornings compulsory then? Did the parents friends not know what their money was going towards? There are huge benefits to the young people going on these trips and they have raised the money themselves so I don't see the problem. They will hopefully do some good and may well come back with some insight into the injustice in the world. It may well make them better people than they would otherwise have been.

If they have prayed 'with' a man that man has taken part in the prayer and therefore given his consent so what business is it of yours?

I think you're pretty funny to wind up religiousists. They need to be gently teased.

I don't have an issue with people going on trips like these. My children were brought up around the world and I think that understanding the extreme poverty some people live in made them better people. It's very different to simply hearing about something on the news.

I do get annoyed by 'English teachers' though. The ones with no qualifications or experience but assume they can do it.

My DS has spent a lot of time helping voluntarily in areas of natural disaster and, most recently, in a refugee camp in Northern Greece. He has not asked anyone for money. He has learned basic building skills, driven and donated his own vehicle (used to transport food, blankets etc).
The fact is that very few trained or qualified people are willing/able to volunteer.
One of the things he discovered is that very little of the British foreign aid sent to the camp he worked in actually arrived. It all seemed to disappear en route...
I guess a lot of these volunteering programmes are well intentioned but there is a lot of exploitation and waste around too.
Not sure how best to tackle this tbh.

Actually - for very little, read none.

Ive seen some abject poverty as part of my travels- it is horrific. I think that seeing it with your own eyes and meeting people who live it is much more impactful on someone than seeing it on tv and so i think it is worthwhile.

I volunteered for a year in a small, rural poor school to help teach English. It was good for them and it was good for me. Last week i spoke to one of the girls i taught who is now at university studying english. I hope that i helped her in that year and now getting herself a degree will help her have a better life and escape the poverty she grew up with.

Prayer is worthless help and could have been done from home. Practical help and resources are actual help

Oh, for heavens sake, ItalianGreyhound, that is a defensive, illogical bleat. Of course it is outrageous that people live on dumps (and incidentally, desperate poverty doth not a 'community ' define). And we can critique more than one aspect of an issue without ignoring the others.

Arawiwa: you actually volunteered for a whole year, passing on skills / education. Do you think nipping in one morning with a bottle of water and a satsuma would have helped that girl get to Uni?

honeyroar
I've known similar style trips.
School/youth group has a link to the schools/childrens centre in the foreign country and students/staff is regularly donating to the school running costs and fundraising.
Every few years or so there is a chance to go and visit the school/centre, meet the children they've been writing letters to and then do some holiday type things in that country. Often the staff on the trip will teach some English lessons when they're over there etc.
I know of about 3-4 trips in my region like that. I think they're great.

Equally, I know of a trip ran locally where it's 'fundraise to go build houses' and in that situation I feel like it would be better if they donated and funded tradespeople who can do a better job than a load of 15 year olds.

It's not possible to be judgey unless you know the details of the trip.

Very few privileged school kids ( and by comparison, all UK kids are privileged - food, water, toilet, education) will be of any use. Plus the cost of lugging them across the world is wasted.

Send money to a reputable agency and do something useful at home. You can get a tan in the UK.

Yanbu. If they'd given even half the money they raised to community projects instead of spending it on flights and hotels, they might have been in with a shout of making a difference, as opposed to just being poverty tourists. Similar to the gap yah crowd who think they can train teachers just because they're white.
Agree with this

Not everyone from England is white but i bet they are all fluent in english if theyve just completed an education in England. A skill that can be incedibly useful

araiwa
On decent trips like the ones I've mentioned the people who are teaching English are actually qualified teachers (and to be honest, even then the people who were better at it were English teachers or teachers who had got their TEFL training, or had previously taught abroad because just being a teacher doesn't mean you can teach English abroad brilliantly).

I can't stand the idea on some trips that just because you were born in England you can teach English abroad and people in 3rd world/developing countries should be eternally grateful for an unqualified British person standing in front of them.

Usually on trips like that, teaching English is more about making it fun, playing games, helping with pronunciation and practicing conversations. Any help with those things will be useful for the kids.

OP- you sound like a patronising idiot

DS speaks 3 languages and is TEFL qualified. It is possible for individuals to do something worthwhile if they research it carefully.