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.