Over the last two months, I have had the opportunity to embark myself on a fascinating journey and, taking advantage of my groupmates’ wise guide and advice, to discover the challenges and penuries that novice volunteers will encounter in their own journey. In this final blog, I will re-visit my previous contributions to our hands-on communication blog project, “A Better Volunteer”, and try to show my conclusions and reflections upon a topic of paramount importance for the humanitarian sector.
The traditional one-to-one relation between development and economic growth has given way to a more holistic understanding of the term that encompasses social, environmental and economic wellbeing. Among other theories, Kleine’s approach proffers the idea of development as the freedom of choice – personal, social, economic and political – which a person may value most. In this context, ICT4D work as invaluable catalyzers for human advancement to help people achieve different ‘degrees of empowerment’ regarding choice capabilities. Needless to say, the volunteering sector has been at the cutting edge of ICTs in their strife to ameliorate community life conditions, taking into consideration their impact on the quality and quantity outcomes of volunteering agency.
I always remember this Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece while having to deal with an unpleasant situation from which I would rather stay away. His dolly zoom effect replicates perfectly the uncomfortable sensation that you experience when your stomach flinches and the subsequent spinning of the head begins.
Marta was about to finish her studies in medicine when she, along with a bundle of fellow doctors-to-be, decided to spend her summer holidays in the Philippines. Blue-eyed and blonde, short and fragile, she is my little niece and the apple of my eye. But she is also self-assured and far stronger than the initial impression that her fragile appearance conveys… And when she felt the spur-of-the-moment drive for joining a humanitarian cause, for living the volunteering experience, and finally, for enjoying two additional weeks in the paradisiacal archipelago, no one in the world was capable of stopping her from crossing the planet. Once back home, she brought her baggage full of countless emotive stories, joy and tears, gratitude from and towards the Filipino people, a worrying sunburn, and hundreds of digital pictures already posted on Facebook and Instagram.
Today I want to discuss with you the issue of volunteering with children and more specifically in orphanages. Although the debate around orphanage tourism is not new, it has lately reached new heights with orphanages being linked to cases of sexual abuse, modern slavery and human trafficking (see here). The bigger audience is thus becoming aware of its practices. The entire industry is based on what Leigh Mathews calls the ‘orphan myth’, which ‘is designed to ensure that there is a ready-made source of people, money and resources to support these children. However, the orphan myth is exactly that – a myth’ (Mathews, 2019, p. 46). It is estimated that over 80% of the children in orphanages have living parents.
Taking a gap year and going abroad to a developing country to volunteer has for a long time been a vital and character forming rite of passage for many conscious and well-meaning youths of the Global North (the term mainly refers to the developed countries of Europe and North America but also Australia and New Zeeland). The desire to be of service and to make a difference in the life of those less fortunate is admirable and should be encouraged. But in our endeavor to do good and help others, we often convince ourselves that we need to travel to a remote village in the Global South – you guessed it, the term refers broadly to low income, less developed regions of South America, Asia and Africa – to build a school or teach English, even though we might not be native English speakers ourselves.
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