to refuse to sponsor this young person

[EmmaGrundyForPM]

An acquaintance has sent out a mass message asking people she knows to sponsor her son to do a 10k run in the New Year.
Son is 17, Y13, and next summer is going to Uganda to build a playground in a primary school. He's raising funding for this with a target of £2500.

AIBU to think that, if the tables were turned, we wouldn't accept this? If I was told that a group of young people, with no experience, were coming to install playground equipment in my child's primary school, I would be outraged. As would other parents. And yet children in less wealthy countries are expected to be grateful for inexperienced people pitching up at their school.

When DS was in 6th form, there was an "opportunity" to go to Malawi for two weeks and volunteer in a school. I told DS I wouldn't support this, and he didn't go.

Why do schools and colleges run these trips, supposedly to "help" less fortunate children, when in fact it tends to be middle class children who go, because it looks good on their CV.

AIBU?

Can't stand this rubbish. Having lived and worked in West Africa myself I remember sitting with friends watching a UK satalite channel out there with the usual daytime adverts saying "let's help little Koffe have access to clean water by giving £20 a month blah blah blah". So one of my friends got in touch with a big charity and said how she would love to help by organising some sort of volunteer drive using locals. Ireland gave her asylum so she could get an education and becuase she couldn't work she volunteered at their charity shops. When she returned she did so many things to help people and knew the lay of the land well. This was someone any charity would love to have on the ground! The reply she got back was such an eye opener. Of course they were not interested empowering locals to help locals as there was no money in it for them - that's not their business model!

It's lovely to learn about other people's situations in other parts of the world. Education is key to us all understanding each other, not being stuck in this country.

To be fair @RabbitRussell that actually does sound like a great laugh. How about we split the difference and call it a grand? I'll even rinse the recycling out!

I'm in! Is there a discount for a group booking? 😁

Really?

There are regular threads on here where teens don't know how to cook or make a bed. What exactly could these kids each the locals?

I considered volunteering a few years ago. I'm a teacher and I'm fluent in BSL. Uganda had just set up their first school for deaf children.

But I decided I would not be much use to the school due to disability. I donated to the school instead. The government paid for the building and the teachers but the school was raising funds for school uniforms.

@Sigma33 if @RabbitRussell builds it, we will come!

@Sigma33 & @MilkshakesBringAllTheCoosToTheYard perhaps we can work out some form of cultural exchange. My teens still haven't mastered the dishwasher or putting all the period packaging in the bathroom bin and that's with one to one tuition. We're pretty multi cultural here in Cornwall, our friends from Devon (see, cross border exchange already in place) confirm that their kids also struggle with basic household skills.

However most of our lot can light a BBQ on the beach and source alcohol under age. If any governments would like a delegation of jam first kids to teach their adult populations how to text really fast with their thumbs, get in touch.

Definitely! We have already risked a family trip as far as Cornwall, and so feel DD is fully equipped to come and patronise you while engaging on pointless, feel-good activities.

This isn’t fair at all. Most people on this thread care hugely about all of these issues. The point about volunteering in the UK instead isn’t because PPs are isolationist, but to make the point that most of these teens just like the idea of a jolly abroad; there are many hundreds of communities in the UK that would love funding and free labour to build, maintain, develop, or clear areas for their benefit and enjoyment, but are organisations enabling that? No, because it doesn’t look so sexy.

Posters also do donate to these causes. There have been plenty of recommendations here of charities where the money goes straight to the source abroad, for organisations run for and by locals, rather than UK-based groups who skim an awful lot off the top in the name of ‘admin fees’ (I’ve got some knowledge of this).

And to say PPs don’t care about the people who need help abroad is just disingenuous - posting factual articles about the damage of voluntourism (including the huge psychological damage done to local children when the orphanage volunteers disappear off again, or providing things like playgrounds that the communities don’t actually want but look great on the charities’ Book Now pages) so we can learn to do better is far more important than any of our teens having this on their CVs and UCAS forms.

I’ve been embarrassed to discover the nonsense at the heart of these things, after I’d done one, but that doesn’t mean I should bury my head in the sand about it or we’ll never improve anything.

If these trips were so effective at “leaving a lasting impression” on the voluntourists, all the people at senior levels in government and corporations who all did these kinds of trips ten or twenty or thirty years ago would be falling over themselves to funnel money to developing countries and tackle the causes of global inequality. And yet…

I went to Nepal as a student to do this. We had to raise a set amount towards materials etc. i paid my own flights etc. separately. There were local tradespeople leading the construction and build, we were free labour. My groups main task was to level/landscape the grounds ie dig and shift wheelbarrows of earth to try and flatten it all out (where then actual tradesmen would be able to create a garden etc). We also were shown by the tradesmen how to concrete the floors and were directed to do that under their supervision. You don’t just turn up for a week and actually build a whole school, of course there are locals employed.

Ok, so if I read this correctly, the local trades people had to take time out of their working day, to show a bunch of tourists how to do the job, that any local person could do?

So not only you took away time, you also took away the possibility of a local person learning a trade.

Sounds like you added a lot to the community.

Local teens did similar for a school in my hometown as part of a voluntary project put on by the local college. YABU and judgey and trying to make a nice gesture a bad thing. Sometimes people just want to help each other, both at home and abroad. Sometimes people are just trying to be nice. HTH.

It's always obvious who didn't bother to read the thread. It's the same people who don't bother to research why there might be issues with this particular model of tourism.

Why let ignorance stop you giving your view, eh?

trying to make a nice gesture a bad thing.
A lot of times it is a bad thing. As explained numerous times on this thread.

There was a recent thread about a man who gave a random woman in the street flowers, while filming her, in order to put the film on his social media and get congratulated on what a great guy he is. She felt intruded upon, as she hadn't asked to be used as his self-publicity and had no need or wish for the flowers.

People were pretty unanimous that he was not "doing a nice thing", despite the fact that giving flowers is usually a nice gesture.

‘meaning well’ does not compensate for the fact that these voluntourists are not ‘doing well’.

They are causing significant damage to the communities they claim to be helping. The fact they ‘mean well’ and benefit themselves (and no one is saying the people who go on these trips don’t benefit) doesn’t compensate or the harm they cause.

*for the harm they cause

Ahh the mumsnet holier than thou brigade. If we didn’t bother to fundraise for the materials for the build then no community centre would have been built at all and those local tradespeople who “had to take time out their day” would have had no job at all.

Please read the thread and the links to why building random ‘community centres’ using unskilled British labour is not a good thing.

Do you really thing flying multiple Westerners out to do the work at vast expense was the best use of the raised funds? For the cost of one person’s trip multiple labourers could have been paid a living wage. If that’s not a better use of funds, was the community centre really needed at all?

Maybe ask yourself why no reputable charities offer such trips? The trips are only really offered by profit making companies.

Your presence was entirely self serving. Don't try and kid yourself otherwise.
Read the rest of the thread.

*think

Who decided the community centre should be built? Where it should be built?

What activities are going to take place that couldn't have otherwise taken place, and how are they going to benefit the community? How are the activities going to be funded?

Which members of the community in particular?

How is it going to be maintained?

No holier than thou, just question why you are there? If you offer no discernible skills, and were ultimatley manual labour, what did you bring to the community.

As a PP posteed, imagine if each of your £2.5k's (arguments sake figure) was donated to the local community, imagine the materials and equipment they could buy for that.

However, we all know, the reason for going was self serving.