I believe we all had our shares of doing community work, volunteering at a nearby NGO, volunteered internationally or even helped in feeding impoverished homeless or less privileged people.
Some take this to the next step; the overwhelming need to travel and why not volunteer, right? Actually it is a very good idea; you don’t only gain a cultural outlook on different societies, but you also get the chance to consider your way of living. Unfortunately, we are now facing what is called the “white volunteerism”. A lot of reports had been conducted recently to highlight the frenzy of white people volunteering in Africa or Asia; which sometimes their whole experience does more good to their Facebook profile and their pretentious selves rather than the good for the people they try to help/ serve. Most of the people who travel to these continents don’t really speak the language of the people or even comprehend the concept of what their needs are.
I once read a story of an American girl who went on a volunteering program to Sierra Leone. The program required those volunteers to help build a school, which most of them didn’t know how to. So there were local people showing them how and helping them through the process. But one night, the volunteers found that there were other construction workers trying to fix what the volunteers were doing all morning!! Yes, that’s what actually happens when we are so happy getting to volunteer abroad. More harm than any good. Let alone, the numerous happy pictures with black children or Chinese kids or beautiful Indian little girls that we pose with and upload on social media, leaving the fact that we don’t really know their names, that these kids will never see the pictures and that this picture will bring no prosperity to their families.
I am not saying that we don’t have to volunteer, but we can choose to help those abroad NGOs using our excellence in academia or skills that they can’t acquire; i.e fundraising, writing proposals, graphic designing, developing curriculums, doing TOT, connecting to international donor organization, strategic planning or any other form of management. Period.
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