Notes

I volunteered all over the world building, homes in Papua New Guinea, doing post tsunami work in Sri Lanka, helping paint a school in Thailand. And I used to think it was the best way to travel in 2005. I decided to organize my own volunteer trip, a bike ride, across Cambodia with five friends. We were going to teach students we met along the way and raise funds to build a school. We spent months fundraising through Book Sales and bake sales and

Making a community groups. We named the trip, the Pepe ride, with Pepe being protect the Earth. Protect yourself because we were going to teach about the environment and health. The thing is, it turned out there was more than one small problem with our plan. First of all, we didn't really know that much about the environment or health or Cambodia for that matter. And the money that we raise for other small projects that we hadn't research very much got wasted or landed in corrupt. Hands. And that's cool. We hope to build well when I arrived to see it. I found a half empty building and realized something. I already should have known schools don't teach kids. People do I was pretty disappointed as you can imagine that we spent the better part of a year of fundraising and planning and things haven't turned out to be as simple as the celebrity volunteer trips. I've seen on TV.

So, I decided to stay in Cambodia, a bit longer and figure out how we could put that school building. And the rest of the funds, we raise to better use that little bit longer turned into six years living in Cambodia, during which time, I found it an education NGO, and to raise money for the nonprofit work. We were doing. I started a volunteer travel company or I led hundreds of volunteers on trips to Cambodia. At first, our tour has looked a lot like that first bike ride and I took people on trips where we teach English or yoga or painted building but I slowly began to see that. I was part of a growing system that I no longer believed in.

After a decade of joining and leading volunteer trips and from interviewing volunteers from all around the world as part of a book, I'm now co-authoring. I now firmly believe that the growing practice of sending young people abroad to volunteer is often not only failing the communities, they're meant to be serving, but also setting these Travelers. And by extension, our whole society up for failure, in the long run. More and more young people are growing abroad to volunteer, each year, as part of School requirements to build their CVS or part of Gap year trips. Much of this demand is fueled by the opinion that because we come from financially wealthier countries. We have the right or obligation to bestow our benevolence on people. Never mind if we don't speak the language, don't have the skills or experience to qualify for the jobs were doing or don't know anything about what life is like in that quote on

Quote, poor place. Now is a former serial volunteer myself. I'm in no way trying to criticize the good intentions of these volunteer Travelers. I know from my own experience that our desire to help is sincere but I also now know that good intentions are not enough. He had good, intentions are usually enough to get people to support your efforts. The praise and encouragement for international volunteering is almost blind to the details. The process of the research for how these young volunteers are actually going to help. From the time we were fundraising for that first bike trip. Countless numbers of people. Praise their generosity and bravery yet very few people questioned us at all about our plans, perhaps, instead of handing us a check, someone should have asked us how we plan to learn, all we needed to know to be of help to anybody. The local papers wrote articles about us, that made it sound like part of our heroism, was the fact that we can know very much. I believe that our lack of critical engagement when it comes to International volunteering is creating a double standard.