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?

Why teach them, rather than teaching the 'beneficiaries' directly?

One has to wonder how the hell for the last, well forever, girls and women have been coping with periods in Uganda?
You know, before someone well meaning came along and told them how to make their very own sanitary products?

@MilkshakesBringAllTheCoosToTheYard Oh, now I understand!

@DWMoosmum pretty sure there are plenty of Ugandan women who know how to sew. Wouldn't it be better to pay them a wage to teach a community sewing class, or send them supplies so they could teach their own daughters, nieces, granddaughters, neighbor girls how to do this? Women have always had periods so not sure what westerners know about menstruation that Uganda women don't.

I'd be more impressed if the sponsor kid offered his flight to the locals. How many voluntourists ever invite their 'target audience' to their own home and make all that cultural learning bollocks truly reciprocal?

@DavidPeters I agree with most of your post.

But I won't hear a word against used tyres for playgrounds!

Very tired African, here. This is one of those comments that’s lovely on the face of it, but really not if you drill down at all. Let’s drill.

I know we could’ve done more if we hadn’t flown out but it was a really valuable trip for me. To listen to their stories and to get to know the residents.

Was it valuable to them, though? If you know you could have done more if you hadn’t flown out, then your presence there was for your benefit, not theirs.

cancer patients on only paracetamol broke my heart. I’m about to qualify as a vet and I think about the importance of pain management all of the time. The fact it was articulated by a human really hit home to me and helps me advocate for pets that can’t do so themselves.

I’m sure all the terminal Batswana would be delighted to learn that witnessing their human pain has made you such a staunch advocate for relieving the pain of pets. Due to the suffering of poor Africans, the welfare of Fido and Trixie is assured.

we also visited nurseries etc and played with the children and generally gave money.

If a group of strangers popped into your child’s nursery and played with the kids like they were some sort of tourist attraction, that would be unacceptable, I assume? But it’s fine when you do it to a little Motswana? You gave money, after all. It’s only fair?

I honestly can’t believe people still think like this in 2022. You’re a hop and a skip away from singing about there not being snow in Africa this Christmastime.

The trouble is well intentioned young people from nice families can actually exacerbate problems rather than address them. Orphanages being one such problem.

In Cambodia, 40 years after the Khmer Rouge genocide, the number of orphanages has grown, according to the UN. The reason is demand – but not from abandoned children or desperate mothers. Instead, it comes from a huge rise in Australian tourists willing to pay to work in them.

Children in orphanages are often not orphans. Save the Children looked at orphanages in Sri Lanka in 2005 and found that just like in Cambodia, 92% of children had a living parent. A 2006 survey by Unicef in Liberia found that 98% of children living in orphanages were not orphans.

One orphanage in Haiti, established after the earthquake in 2010, kept children malnourished and living in filth, with no stimulation. Yet it collected donations averaging £7,700 per year per child - a not insignificant amount. That institution was engaged in trafficking and selling children for adoption to families in wealthy countries, recruited children using a baby-finder, who convinced poor parents their children would be better off in the institution. Similar situations have been seen in Uganda, Kenya and Cambodia.

Almost every poor country still puts children in institutions, even though the vast majority of those children have families. Wealthy countries, who consider orphanages harmful for their own children, still provide a stream of charitable giving that makes orphanages viable businesses abroad both from trafficking and from volunteers bringing money.

Those seeking to help are inadvertently feeding a huge business of child neglect and abuse.

Instead of training your friends, the money would have been better spent training local women who then have a job and can continue to train more local women and girls long after your friends have gone home.

Agreed. I don't necessarily blame the young people who are often joining these trips with good intentions. I was naive at 18 too.

And there are always people who pretend to only want to help but would never consider doing anything charitable unless they benefit hugely - like people who only want to do charitable work in exotic warm locations rather than a grim British city in February in fact.

I see nothing wrong about someone starting a thread about (usually well off) teenagers ripping off friends and relatives (often without realising what they are doing) to go on a foreign jolly with a side of white saviorism and damage to the local economy caused by replacing paid jobs with volunteer labour.

And that’s the better companies where what is built is vaguely useful and the for profit company doesn’t rip down whatever has been built just in time for the next lot of voluntourists to arrive.

The sad thing is many of these kids actually do think they are helping when they are really part of a commercial enterprise that is causing significant damage to the various countries.

A church near me helped properly - partnered with locals, found out what they actually needed, arranged to pay salaries to the builders. One person from the church went over for the opening - he paid for the trip himself. Every penny raised went to the project not for church members having a holiday.

I imagine £2500 would be a very good wage to get a local person to do it.

I agree, I don't know why schools support these trips either.

YANBU. It's so condescending to the locals. Help them to improve their lives themselves and give them social power, don't come flying in thinking you're the most charitable person in the world. That is absolutely the worst thing to do, socially, economically and environmentally.

Everything about these projects are painfully problematic. White saviourism at it’s about worst. I’m surprised that these schemes are still going. They should be banned.

She'd had a lovely time adding to orphans attachment issues in India

How beautifully put.

I think there must be a better way to build cultural exchanges, for example more school exchanges

Oh, and the number of people who wanted to 'come and play with the children'...

Strangely enough, they weren't inviting random strangers into their home to play with (gawp at and photograph, then putting the photos all over SM) their children...

Look at all the food banks and deprivation in Britain. To willingly and anonymously give your time at home over a long period would be far better, if less of an exotic experience.

Many of the people supporting this are doing so in terms of the specific benefits to the voluntourists and not the local community, which just shows a mindset where it's about the privileged young people rather than the people they're supposed to be helping:

Teaching skills is useful

Maybe this young man is going to learn something about another culture, about himself and about humanity more broadly.

it was a really valuable trip for me. To listen to their stories and to get to know the residents.

They are a very deprived country and these women went to to teach them to be self sufficient

these trips can have a beneficial effect not just on the communities that they help, but on the kids themselves who go and do the work involved

the builder kids get to do a fun experience

The important aspect of these trips is to shake all the DCs out of their complacency

I looked into, this when I was taking a bit of a career break. I am a qualified construction project manager/ site supervisor with loads of direct experience of exactly the kind of community project these companies organise. I naively offered my expertise to one touting at the local uni. (Offering my time for free — uk based or abroad)

They couldn’t backpedal hard enough when they found I wasn’t a college kid with £2k to hand over. They were really cagey with me. And it made me very suspicious as to why they really didn’t want to engage.

One thing I do see a lot, is that even in the uk it is easier to fundraise for a shiny new thing. But no one will give you money for the upkeep of what you do have. There’s loads of play areas in England that got paid for under a previous government scheme. Unfortunately they need regular checking and maintenance to keep them safe. Many town and parish councils are realising, a few years down the line they are landed with a bloody white elephant.

if an affluent European community struggles with organising and funding upkeep for a thing they actually did want. How the fuck is a bloody impoverished third world community going to manage.

I think it has already been said OP. To be honest I did not realise this is still a thing and this model of 'fundraising' had been well and truly discredited. Paying skilled, local people (and fundraising to do so) will achieve the same (actually a better build) and have a positive impact on the local community. Sending unskilled, white teenagers on a jolly is just so wrong on every level. Let's be honest, even skilled professionals working for NGOs have been under increasing scrutiny with some questionable practice.

It is the same with all the 'bucket list' fundraisers for UK based charities such as walking the Great Wall, trekking South America. They were discredited many years ago as doing nothing for the local communities and basically funding someone's wish list. Walk the M1 or whatever- no need to pay for air travel so more for charity 😉

Very I interesting and very telling.

And this was more effective than providing funds to a local established charity doing work in this area? Sending a couple of randoms to a different continent to teach something in which they are not skilled?

No, it’s clearly not more effective. But, that way, your friends got an ‘experience’. They can now talk about how said experience changed them and they learnt so much from their proximity to abject poverty. Probably some nonsense about ‘friendly’ people and purity of souls.

YAdefinitelyNBU. It's such a scam - all the things PPs have pointed out.
Also, good luck to him raising 2.5K for running 10K. He's 18, so unless he has some decent reason why this would be a challenge for him, frankly it should be a piece of piss. My DS did a 10K in Y13 to help out his friend's mum, who was organising it and needed bodies. Never ran before or since, only sport he did was weights and cycling as transport.

AIBU? I went to pick DS up from nursery today and there was a crowd of secondary students from god knows where 'playing' with them in the yard. They were all taking photos, I collared one of them and they had put pics of my DS on their insta and all over their school's twitter. I'm really protective of DS's online privacy, so I'm really upset. After some digging, I found out the group weren't DBS registered and didn't even speak English! So I've complained to the school but apparently they need a new playground and it's good for the bigger kids to play with little kids? I'm really confused and don't want to send DS to nursery tomorrow.

That post is all about you. About how much the experience has helped you.

FFS if you can't see how utterly offensive it is to use people in developing countries as a learning experiences for a privileged white person, I feel really sorry for you.

Honestly cringing for you.