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?

I totally agree. This really gets my goat. Especially if the money raised is to cover the costs of the trip rather than the building materials. You're just paying for their holiday! And there is a huge amount of need at home that never gets addressed. There is no way in hell my kids will be doing this and they will get an earful if they propose it.

And who is going to maintain this type of playground once the overseas voluntourists leave?

The most likely answer is no-one because no-one will have the money for the expensive materials.

I did this when I was 17, back when it was community service volunteers. Bloody fantastic. Oh, and they pay you, you don't have to get your mum's pals to give you money.

volunteeringmatters.org.uk/opportunity/full-time-volunteer-opportunity-all-over-the-uk/

I hate voluntourism with a passion and once got into a stand-up fight with a dad when I mentioned that. Had forgotten his DD had done it. She'd had a lovely time adding to orphans attachment issues in India, he'd paid for 50% of it, then he was a bit unchuffed it wasn't making her personal statement stand out.

Exactly what I meant, fund raise £2500 and forget going on a jolly to gawp at the poor people like some obscene tourist attraction, donate it all.

There are many playgrounds in the uk that need rebuilding,

It’s win win. The kids in Uganda get a new playground and the builder kids get to do a fun experience. Being self righteous and woke on the other hand is lose lose.

your poor son missing out on a trip to Malawi.

to be honest I think it would be a great thing if people from other countries wanted to do volunteer projects in the uK. It’s enriching and let’s them experience a side to the country that they wouldn’t on a holiday. It doesn’t have to be instead of volunteering locally either.

You hit the nail on the head there @MsFogi

Ffs sometimes not everything is about money. It shows a real lack of empathy and knowledge to think the point is just to build a playground. They will use local staff to plan and supervise the build. The local community will be involved at every stage.
The important aspect of these trips is to shake all the DCs out of their complacency - to let them see that throwing money overseas or anywhere where people are disadvantaged is a type of paternalism that does not foster understanding; does not establish links and makes it really easy for those who are more fortunate to ignore the real structural issues surrounding poverty, trade, debt, climate change, etc.

I’d sponsor people to:

Do my gardening
Clean my house
Wash my car
Mind my kids
Do my laundry
Do my shopping
Make the dinner

But nobody wants to do any of that. They want to go abseiling or run a marathon or go and build an igloo in Africa. I’m not interested in paying someone to do these glory hunting challenges - challenges that people would pay to do anyway.

Are you going to pay for them to come here? You'd have to be very rich in Uganda to afford the cost of a holiday in the UK.

Plus, you would probably be refused a visa by the Home Office to enter the country on the grounds you might not go home again and disappear into the black economy.

It is a business model which will have some benefit to the tourist industry in the country. The people who provide the accommodation, food and transport will be getting some money out of it. It is a bit naive to think they are taking away work from locals as there would be no playground built if it wasn’t for the scheme. It is a bit patronising to think that the local people aren’t totally aware of how it all works and ready to take advantage of any business opportunity it provides. I wouldn’t sponsor it, but it isn’t something that bothers me.

White saviour complex…

Christ Jesus, do you really think that women in girls in Uganda can't sew a washable sanitary pad?

The local community will be involved at every stage.
Wishful thinking. Often its just large voluntourism companies organising this with very little local input.

It's a bit white saviour-y but I would still give him a fiver.

This is bullshit.

Poor countries are not there to act as "growth experiences" for your privileged DC. It is entirely possible to visit such places in a non-exploitative way, inform yourself of issues in the wider world, and develop empathy and understanding without this bullshit.

(Privileged, because anyone who can raise £2.5k from their family/friends is not moving in hard-up circles)

Volunteer tourism is tourism and is the only tourism many of these areas will get. Kids helping build a playground at vast cost to themselves are not taking work away from locals. They are putting money into the country and community.

I remember last year someone did a post on some of the just giving pages.it was shocking.

Very unlikely. Most likely is that the company making a profit has said to the community leaders - would you like a children's playground?

And the community leaders, understandably, have said yes. Because it would be lovely to have a children's playground.

If you go to the community leaders and asked 'what does your community need?' you would almost certainly get a whole load of answers before you get to a children's playground. The children are playing already. They have games that include making worlds with the sand from the ground, from sticks and stones, from discarded bits and pieces, and from trees they climb, with old bits of rope tied to branches that become a swing. Another bit of rope is a skipping rope. The idea that there needs to be a separate, expensively constructed 'playground' is another cultural imposition.

The community social worker where I worked in a South African township ran parenting classes that included ideas of how to play with your children - endless games and activities that needed nothing more than sticks, stones, and other things easily found lying around.

Totally agree. This is such a ridiculous bit of CV fodder/experience holiday. I have no idea why it's taken until comparatively recently for most people to question WHY the good people of wherever would want our most well-spoken youths to turn up and build something when those same youths have no idea how to do it, where to get the stuff, or what local kids would want.

There are some travel/gap year things I still think are worthwhile though:

• sharing a skill you have, like the musician DD mentioned above, nurses etc taking time out
• teaching English if you're willing to be working somewhere for at least 6 months and you take it seriously
• long-term projects where schools or churches etc form connections that last for a long time and there is cultural exchange between two communities and the ones in the better off country can help support the other one

Just my opinion. I have been involved in one of those things and we used to look at the equivalent of the student mentioned by OP and just wonder how the heck they convinced themselves they were being any use whatsoever.

White saviour complex and volunteer tourism at its best it's an absolute load of crap. All of these countries have thousands of their own teens perfectly capable and willing to build things and they regularly do.

I went abroad tdeveloping nation as a qualified volunteer to help train other professionals in my specialist field and the amount of this nonsense we saw was awful and incredibly offensive. Particularly teens going to orphanages to 'help' its the least helpful thing for these children as they constantly build trusting relationships only to be 'abandoned' all over again.

Ohhhhh....how much do I need to raise to do that? It looks a much nicer beach to work on than Skeggy beach.

I wouldn't sponsor him.

He's wants to play tourist in some very deprived peoples lives with zero training in whatever fake reason to take a poverty porn holiday they have come up with this year.

If he was going to raise the money to pay those local people in that area to build the stuff while he didn't spend any of it on himself it would be different.
Or raise the money to pay an actual qualified tradesman to go out & teach the locals how to do the work with the rest of the money paying for the materials.

This is just about a bullshit holiday to stick on his CV where he can jack himself off about how much help he was to 'poor people'.

My sister paid for my nephew to do it last year (not that exact thing, but similar).
He came back full of how amazing it was/life changing blah blah.
That lasted until he got tired of showing every one the photos.
Hasn't changed a bit & is still whining about his very privileged life. (a boy who will leave uni with zero student debt)
All his friends are exactly the same.

I really don't like this. The people getting the most out of this are not the ones living in poverty.