Are you a voluntourist?!

So voluntourism is the new word on the block. The idea that middle-class “Westerners” are travelling to impoverished communities to do a job that they are un-skilled to do and could be done by a local (Use the word Westerners in the 1950s version before China and India took over the world. Northerners is probably more apt nowadays).

When I was selected by Project Trust as an 18 year old, straight out of college, to go to rural Guyana and start teaching, stealing the job of a local teacher was a worry that I harboured. Thankfully, there was and still is a brain-drain of skilled workers, including teachers, so for many of us, we arrived in our communities to find a shortage of teachers, skilled or unskilled. And although I made a fairly average attempt at teaching, I became a teacher where there wasn’t one. However, Project Trust is a rare exception to the idea that “voluntourists take jobs from the community.” Last summer I saw a collection of Japanese tourist with SLR cameras round their necks whilst they built a brick wall around a school that had a view of the Himalayas (before the brick wall). Each week, I see a new set of Matching T-shirts downstairs at the café drinking coffee in the tropical Sun before they venture out into remote villages to hand out bibles or build a fence.

 

 

But rather than quell this myth (which I can’t possibly do- there are a scarily numerous number of examples of miss-placed “benevolence” like the house-builders in Haiti to name one of many; http://www.cntraveler.com/ecotourism/2013/02/volunteer-vacations-rewards-risks) I volunteered for purely selfish reasons. I did gain confidence, resilience and a hundred other skills that teaching develops but I didn’t change the world and I never planned to.

This argument caught my attention for two reasons. One was seeing this stomach-churning blog (https://medium.com/race-class/b84d4011d17e) and the main reason was planning and co-leading a voluntourism trip this summer (Note: Voluntourism isn’t always meant in a derogatory way). This blog and many others made me question the point in my idea of useful volunteering. However, LRTT (www.lrtt.org) has opened my eyes to the real benefits of it. By being part of planning and delivering teacher training sessions to and alongside some amazing teachers, I have learnt so much about teaching and leading that it has completely changed the way I think about and deliver lessons.

 

But LRTT is not designed to enhance the CV of a UK teacher. It also increases educational opportunity in contexts that need it by sharing teaching tips and celebrating the value of teachers in these contexts. The sessions are fun and have an electrifying intensity that rubs off on all the teachers in the room. We’re not “rescuers,” LRTT will not save the world, but it will build capacity in teachers from the UK of elsewhere so that their students can go on to save the world.

This is why I believe in LRTT. This is the crux of the argument against voluntourism. Paying thousands of pounds to a travel agent to save the world is never going to work. Sharing a skill you have worked tirelessly to improve with people who have done exactly the same but in other contexts. This is going to work and this is why I recommend LRTT to every teacher I meet.

Mount Roraima- The Ascent, explosive skies and flying dinosaurs

Crawling out of the tent after a dinner of dry bread and tinned sardines, I looked up. Straight ahead was the ominous grey-brown, 2700m high cliff of Mount Roraima. Then FLASH, the cliff lit up with pinks and yellows, illuminated by a distant electric storm over the town of Santa Elena in Venezuela. Aside from the storms on the horizon, the sky was clear. Clear but close, made closer by the star which were numerous and vast. The sky was full. The fullest I have ever seen. Orion’s belt was to my right, the big dipper over my shoulder and the Southern Cross hanging just above the storms. All this was cut through by the sweeping arc of the Milky Way.

Long days of sweaty trekking, countless meals of tinned sardines on bread crumbs and cold damp nights even inside a 4 season sleeping bag seemed so insignificant with this nightly spectacular at the base camp of Mount Roraima.

 

 

We woke bright and early for the final trek in which we would summit Mount Roraima. I have wanted to do this for years and now the time had finally come. The full day’s route could be seen from base camp as if in a final effort by the mountain to scare off weary climbers or at least fill them with the nightmares of the prehistoric beasts that still ruled the top of the mountain.

We spent the morning scrambling upwards through dense forest towards the foot of the cliffs. At lunch we reached the base of the cliff. It was so close that we rested our bags against it but a quick glance upwards gave us our plan for the afternoon. The cliff soared straight upwards from where we stood. You couldn’t even see the top which was shrouded in clouds. Occasional plants dotted up the cliff face, gripping on for fear of plummeting to the forest below. Waterfalls sprouted out of “The Wall” and gave us the source of our midday wash/ water refills.

 

 

Getting our fill of the mountain delicacy that is boneless sardines, we marched onwards. The final section is known as “The Ramp.” It is the only way up the mountain without ropes and the reason we had to come to Venezuela for the climb even though it borders Guyana and Brazil. The ramp was pioneered by two Brits in 1884 with ideas of finding dinosaurs on top. It is hard to decide if these two were brave or stupid. Walking through Amerindian villages on the way, they were warned of the beasts that lived on the mountain that occasionally flew down to steal Amerindian babies.

 

 

After three hours we closed in on the end of the ramp. Blocking our final ascent were the “Tears of Roraima”- a waterfall that spouted from the top and never ceasing in its year-round deluge onto climbers heads. Blindly we rushed through the water in a last scramble over the loose rocks that made a sketchy path up the narrow ramp...