Tag Archives: abroad

Is trauma while volunteering abroad inevitable?

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graphic representing volunteers performing various service activities.

On one of the many online communities I’m on, one for people interested in serving as Peace Corps members, someone wrote about wanting to serve but also wanting to know what resources there would be “given the unfortunate, yet seemingly inevitable, traumatic experiences” a volunteer is probably going to face.

One of the responses was particularly excellent:

I want to challenge one point: trauma is not inevitable. It’s a dangerous framing to prospective service and sets up a self-fulfilling prophecy. Service is stressful, but it is not always traumatic.

I really liked this response, and the rest of it. I see a lot of people who want to work or volunteer abroad, in developing or post-conflict countries, in humanitarian initiatives, and they say things implying that the worst trauma-inducing events – assault, theft, sexual exploitation, life-altering injury, intense hostility from locals, witnessing violence or extreme, dire poverty – is inevitable.

None of that is inevitable in working or volunteering abroad in humanitarian efforts. It’s not inevitable working or volunteering in your own country. Could any of those circumstances happen to you? Yes – abroad or at home. Does any of that happen? Yes – abroad or at home. But none of it is inevitable.

I do believe in being prepared for The Worst – at home or abroad. It’s why, on the section of my web site about travel, I talk about always having a plan: what would you do if faced with the absolute worst circumstances, and the aftermath, while abroad? Do you know exactly who should call and where you should go if you are in danger or have experienced trauma? As someone who has frequently traveled abroad to not-so-stable countries, I have plans, even for being kidnapped, and have discussed them with loved ones. The likelihood of ever needing to employ those plans is small, but it gives me comfort to know I have a plan.

What’s much more likely when serving abroad: feelings of loneliness and isolation. Feeling that you don’t have an outlet or escape to take a mental health break. I had an Afghan colleague say, “It must be so hard for you here. I have my family to go home to each night. You have nothing.” It was a gut punch because it was true! It was one of the reasons I started going to a coffee shop frequented by expats every Friday: I was spending WAY too much time alone outside of work hours.

What is also much more common is a feeling of helplessness or disillusionment with your service. Realizing that one person really can’t change the world, and that your work may not actually transform the lives of anyone significantly, is not just humbling, it can make you question everything you think about yourself, the work of humanitarians, and, well, all of humanity. It’s a reality check many people that want to work or volunteer abroad aren’t prepared for.

As noted by that aforementioned Reddit poster:

Peace Corps volunteers have to be resilient and develop those self-management tools during service. That is a fundamental requirement when living remotely with limited resources.

This is true of anyone that wants to serve away from home, and especially in another country, even one that is quite peaceful and stable.

The responder goes on to say:

The best thing to do is discover and train your resilience today: Learn coping mechanisms. Develop healthy habits. Be disciplined with your time. Learn to accept what you cannot change and be content with what you can. Set boundaries. Exercise. Learn to maintain a positive attitude. Be selfless. Arguably, this is the most important thing. Service is going to be a path you’ll have to walk alone. It is demanding and mentally challenging, but you have to be strong.

And I second all of this! If you really want to be effective working or volunteering abroad in humanitarian contexts, you can’t assume you have these skills; you have to take a hard look at yourself and how you cope now with stress, strife, frustrations and, indeed, trauma.

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The delicate challenge of warning volunteers & others going abroad about racism or sexism they may experience.

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I have been uncomfortable for many years with the lack of guidance about the specific discrimination black volunteers and black professional humanitarian workers face when they go abroad. I’ve seen the discrimination, firsthand: at airports, in restaurants, in shops and even on the streets in countries all over the world without many black residents – including Germany and Afghanistan. And I’ve heard so many first-hand horror stories from humanitarian colleagues about what they’ve experienced. Yet, when I’ve tried to find guidance on how to be an ally or guidance for people experiencing discrimination, I’ve found nothing.

So I was impressed that the Peace Corps starkly and specifically acknowledged this situation and was frank about just how much harder it can be for black volunteers – specifically for Ukraine, but the reality is that this warning would be valid for a variety of countries where the Peace Corps has, or used to, place members, including Russia. The Peace Corps recommends that the Black volunteers react to racism in various ways depending on the situation, choosing to “remove themselves” from the situation for their own safety, get help from other volunteers or staff, or practice and explore self-care or coping strategies. It’s similar to the recommendations for women humanitarian workers – or women travelers: when you are in a country where you may not be respected, you’ve got to be prepared to deal with ugly comments and ugly situations and you won’t have the resources you have in the USA (not that law enforcement in my country always takes a woman’s safety concerns seriously, but I digress).

This article in the Atlanta Black Star says “Some have rebuked the Peace Corps for not doing more to protect Black volunteers.” One person tweeted that the Peace Corps shouldn’t send black Americans “to a place like this where you know they’ll be racially abused” and claimed that the Peace Corps was placing “the burden of educating racists” on the shoulders of Black members.

I think it would be a terrible shame if the Peace Corps didn’t send black Americans to Ukraine or anywhere in Eastern Europe or Asia or anywhere else where there is not a large black population, or if the United Nations didn’t send black African professional humanitarians to Afghanistan or elsewhere in Asia and on and on. Absolutely, people need to be safe, and there has to be a consideration for what specific challenges an African, a woman, a trans person, a person of a particular nationality, and others may face in various countries – and it may mean not sending a great candidate somewhere because the security situation is just too tenuous for the person, specifically. But while the Peace Corps’ primary mission is to empower communities in underserved parts of the work, the corps is also intended to promote mutual understanding between citizens of the USA and foreign peoples. Black Americans are a part of the rich fabric that makes up the USA. You cannot understand this country without experiencing its very specific forms of black culture.

I’m going to continue to do all I can, including abroad, to be an ally. I stumble, sometimes I flounder, often I misstep, but I’m going to keep trying. And I hope everyone else will too, not only for Black Americans but for any person who might be targeted for insults, harassment, abuse or violence.

I’m also going to continue to try to encourage people, especially women, to travel abroad, while also offering realistic safety recommendations (and I’ve been criticized for my recommendations by women travelers who say they have never experienced any problems and I’m being alarmist. Sigh.).

When your perceived race, sexual identity, religion or nationality can put you in danger in a region, you have every right to know of the specific dangers you might face, and you have every right to reconsider going to that region. And when you feel insulted anywhere, you have every right to choose how you are going to react, based on what you think is the appropriate thing to do.

I know if I made a list of everything that has been said to me by local people where I’m living or working, targeting me as a woman or as an American, I would scare a lot of folks from traveling abroad. Sometimes, I have pushed back: I’ve sometimes expressed anger, I’ve sometimes expressed hurt feelings, and I’ve sometimes just walked away – it depends on how safe I feel and what I think the consequences might be. It’s all my choice to make. I hope that my reactions have sometimes helped to change some local people’s minds – but I can only do so much.

What do you think of its advisory to applicants about racism they may face? Share your thoughts in the comments.

For those who think the Peace Corps, or any other volunteering abroad or humanitarian agency, should “do more” to “protect” black volunteers & humanitarian workers, what would that look like? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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How will SARS-CoV-2 & COVID-19 affect volunteering abroad?

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SARS-CoV-2, the infectious disease which causes Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), will change volunteering abroad – and all international humanitarian response.

This change won’t be just for the next two years – it could be forever. I have been thinking a lot about that lately, and was going to write about it – but this editorial analysis by Ali Al Mokdad at DevEx says everything I’ve been thinking – and more.

Mokdad notes that the ongoing pandemic means that many international non-governmental organizations “will finally pay extra attention to the importance of nationalizing and localizing interventions, and that “community-based interventions and empowering local staff will be among the main themes of the new cultural and operational shift that the pandemic is causing.” It notes that “we are going to see more local staff as program managers, site managers, coordinators, and senior members in leadership positions within INGOs” and that, as INGOs reduce their rate of direct implementation – putting international staff into the field – their staff profiles could shift from that of operational expertise to fundraising, technical support, analysis, advocacy, and strategic leadership positions.

This shift is also going to greatly affect volunteering abroad programs. Mokdad notes the criticisms of voluntourism (as have I) and adds:

The economic situation and safety considerations after COVID-19 will not provide a chance for people interested in unpaid internships to go abroad to support country mission programs. INGOs will not be able to afford the risk of offering such opportunities, and people will not be able to afford working without pay. Unpaid internships and voluntary work will only increase at the local and national level, but voluntourism will slowly disappear.

I will add one more thing: I see a big demand coming for high-responsibility, high-impact remote volunteering – virtual volunteering in support of locally-based NGOs in the developing world. I see it as both a substitution for many short-term volunteering abroad programs for the next two years, and a permanent option even beyond that. And I may be getting funding to explore the idea. Stay tuned.

What do you think?

Here’s all of my many blogs about voluntourism.

And here is something I am soft launching: Ideas for High Impact Virtual Volunteering Activities: This resource is for people seeking ideas for an online project that will mobilize online volunteers in activities that lead to a sustainable, lasting benefit to a community or cause, particularly for a community or audience that is at-risk or under-served. I created it especially for programs looking for ways to engage online volunteers in high-responsibility, high-impact tasks focused on communities in the developing world, because onsite volunteering abroad is not an option – which is the reality in 2020, and probably 2021, because of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), an infectious disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). These ideas absolutely can be adapted for remote volunteering within the same country where the online volunteers live as well – “remote” could mean across town rather than around the world.

If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help. 

Hosting International Volunteers: A Where-To-Start Guide For Local Organizations

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I’m seeing more and more local organizations – non-governmental organizations (NGOs), charities, schools – in developing countries posting on sites like Reddit, asking foreign volunteers to travel to their countries and volunteer. These NGOs and others offer no information on whether or not its legal for foreigners to come to the country and volunteer, no information on what they will do to ensure volunteers will be safe, no information on what screening they do of volunteers to ensure safety of volunteers – they just post, “Hey, we help orphans / wildlife / women, and you can come here and help us.”

It’s troubling.

The reality is that it is not ethical nor appropriate for any NGO to recruit foreign volunteers unless they are already involving LOCAL volunteers and have the full endorsement of local people for the work they do, and it is inappropriate for them to recruit foreign volunteers unless they have complete information on assignments, safety, screening, quality control and more.

That said, some NGOs have a legitimate need for foreign volunteers, and this page on my web site is meant to help.

Hosting International Volunteers: A Where-To-Start Guide For Local Organizations provides detailed suggestions for NGOs in developing countries interested in gaining access to foreign volunteers. This is a “getting started” guide, NOT a comprehensive guide: it’s impossible within the boundaries of a simple web page to detail all an organization needs to do to host volunteers from other countries.

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If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help. 

know before you go: volunteering by foreigners is illegal in some countries

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I’m one of the moderators of the forum on Reddit – called a subreddit – on volunteering. Most of the questions on that forum are by people looking to volunteer and, often, they are looking to volunteer for a few weeks in another country. This is voluntourism, and anyone who reads this blog regularly knows I’m not fond of the practice: it is vanity volunteering, focused on giving a foreigner a feel-good experience rather than actually helping someone and, in fact, such “volunteering” can actually harm children, wildlife – even the volunteers themselves.

In some countries, volunteering by foreigners is, in fact, illegal. Despite its illegality, some NGOs – which are really for-profit companies – try to recruit foreigners to pay thousands of dollars to come “help” in their communities.

For instance, in most cases, volunteering by foreigners in Indonesia is illegal. The Indonesian immigration police in the country make regular visits to certain communities to check the legal status of people who say they are volunteers and foreigners who say they are being paid to work. You can read a news report from July 2016 about one of the raids on foreign volunteers here.

Bukit Lawang in North Sumatra, Indonesia is a popular tourist destination located on the edge of the Gunung Leuser National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site home to numerous bird, plant and mammal species, most famously the Sumatran orangutan (Pongo abelii). Nearby tourist businesses operate jungle treks, transport, tours, and other activities in the area – and field a LOT of questions about wildlife volunteering.

bukitlawang.com has a page about the laws regarding volunteering by foreigners in Indonesia, one that I wish more countries and popular tourism sites had. The Bukit Lawang page says that the main type of foreign visas for the country are the following (the bullets are cut and pasted from the site):

    • visa-free entry permit (received on arrival, free, at the airport) – voluntary work is always illegal

    • visa-on-arrival (paid on arrival at the airport at the cost of $35) – voluntary work is always illegal

    • tourist visa (paid abroad at the cost of around $50) – voluntary work is always illegal

    • social visa (paid abroad at the cost of around $50) – voluntary work is usually illegal. For the voluntary work to be legal, the social visa must have been sponsored (with an accompanying letter) by a registered Indonesian yayasan (charity/foundation) and during the application, the sponsorship letter must state that the foreigner is performing volunteer work for the foundation. A sponsorship letter that merely says something along the lines of ‘I am an Indonesian citizen and I am sponsoring Mr. X to visit Indonesia’ would NOT be valid for volunteer work in Indonesia, it ONLY entitles you to stay in Indonesia for a holiday/family visit, and no kind of work is permitted. A sponsorship letter from an individual, one that is not stamped by a charity/foundation is almost certainly NOT valid for work in Indonesia.

  • KITAS – sponsored by a charity or employer. This costs around $1200 per year (including work permit and visa) and is valid for paid and/or unpaid work of the specified nature at the specified employer.

The page also offers the following throughs about voluntourism. Remember – these are coming from an Indonesia-based organization:

Voluntourism is big business around the globe. In Indonesia specific considerations are:

    • low cost of labour – the minimum wage is around $5/day, and many earn even less. If you emphasise the ‘tourism’ aspect of voluntourism, then it may make sense to spend thousands on your trip, but the ‘volunteer’ element may be lacking.

    • your skills – if you are a young person with no work or life experience unfortunately you may have little to offer except your time. Effective volunteers will have specific skills that are relevant and scarce in a rural developing area.

    • culture differences – Indonesian culture is very different from your own. Communities are interconnected and foreigners are ‘other’. You will also face a language barrier – while those working in tourism will speak English, these are certainly not the people in need of help – those in need are generally far from the tourist areas.

    • transparency – Indonesia does not have a big charity culture; rather, charity is said to begin at home, and the concept of working for free is largely alien. You should therefore check exactly how the goals of the charity or project organiser himself are aligned with those of the charity. Do not be afraid to ask questions. Indonesian staff need money, but they must explain to volunteers exactly how they benefit financially from their charity.

    • safeguarding – Indonesia and other developing countries are open and have few safeguarding policies in place. This means that children can be at risk. If your project is working with children be sure to check about their safeguarding policies

    • effectiveness – be sure that your project is effective in achieving its and your goals. Ask specific questions and look at how results are measured.

  • immigration concerns – your volunteer work is likely to be illegal – see above.

It’s refreshing to see a local institution speak out so strongly against voluntourism and be so explicit about what the law is.

All that said, I should note that it is certainly possible for foreigners to visit Gunung Leuser National Park and see the Sumatran orangutan, something I hope to do myself someday. I learned about it by reading Lone Rider by Elspeth Beard. She’s one of the first women to ride a motorcycle all around the world, doing so back in 1982 – 1984. She wrote about an NGO working in this area, helping to address the huge problem of Indonesians abducting baby orangutans and then wanting to get rid of them when they grow older and are so much harder to care for. Her account of this visit is a good example of transire benefaciendo: “to travel along while doing good” – she didn’t attempt to work at the NGO as a volunteer (which would have been illegal), but she did elevate its work through her book.

I did something similar in Hungary: while camping in Hortobágyi Neuzeti Park, a sea of grasslands, the camp host told us that there was a bird rescue clinic right next door. The next morning, I went there. It turned out the clinic allowed visitors, so we toured, taking photos of their rehabilitation rooms and spaces and getting information, which I translated once we were home so that I could write about the Hortobágy Bird Clinic on my blog. Here is the web site of the clinic as well.

In addition to researching the laws regarding foreign volunteers in a country where you want to go, you should also look at your own country’s laws regarding going elsewhere to volunteer. For instance, Tauqir Sharif, 31, from Walthamstow, England, founded the organization Live Updates from Syria in 2012, providing support and assistance for families in Syria and raising awareness about the devastating situation on the ground. He has been living and working in Idlib, Syria alongside his British wife, Racquell Hayden-Best. He had his UK citizenship revoked in May 2017.
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Paying thousands to volunteer abroad & ignoring same opportunities at home

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Late last year, I did an all-day training for a state fish and wildlife department – a government agency – about how to better engage volunteers: how to better design tasks for a variety of volunteers, to better support volunteers, to better track what they are doing and to recruit – not just recruiting volunteers to get tasks done, but also to recruit in order to reach a variety of communities and people. The people I taught were a mix of biologists and long-time volunteer leaders who had never had training in volunteer management.

(read more about my consulting services and training work)

Before doing this type of intensive, specialized training, I do a lot of research to look at what similar organizations might be doing, trends that the client might want to consider, etc. One of the things that struck me as I was researching state fish and wildlife departments all over the USA was how many activities these agencies have for volunteers that people will pay thousands to go do in another country: building and repairing fish and wildlife habitats, counting wildlife, reporting on habitat conditions and more.

I thought about how this is true of so many other agencies as well: there are nonprofits and government programs all over the USA that will help people learn English, that help refugees navigate their new homes, that help people better understand the risks associated with HIV/AIDS, that help people who have lost their home, that help impoverished women with maternal health and infant care, and on and on – yet, people are willing to pay thousands of dollars for voluntourism experiences that make them feel like they are helping refugees, helping children, helping people at risk, etc., rather than participating in these programs just around the corner – or, at least, in their own country.

I don’t like voluntourism, where people pay money to go to another country and feel like they are helping people or the environment in just a few weeks, and I blog about my distaste frequently. So many – not all, but so many – are scams: a supposed wildlife sanctuary captures wild animals and puts them into enclosures and then sells voluntourism experiences, bringing in foreigners to “help.” A supposed orphanage is full of children who have parents, but the parents are paid to keep their children in the “orphanage” so that foreigners will pay large sums of money to come from overseas and “help.” The organizations take anyone who can pay – they don’t need anyone with actual skills or expertise because, supposedly, no one locally can do this “work”, so they must bring in anyone from abroad with “a good heart.” Sure, there are some worthwhile organizations for short-term volunteering abroad – and I list them on this free resource on my web site. But most are, to me, loathsome.

But I also am puzzled as to why so many nonprofits and government agencies in the USA – and other countries – do such a lousy job of talking about their volunteering opportunities. When I told the state agency I was training that people pay thousands of dollars to go do in, say, Kenya, many of the same volunteering tasks that this state agency struggles to find volunteering activities for, they were stunned. But it’s true!

Have a look at some of those shiny, heart-warming voluntourism sites. I’m not going to link to them here, but trust me, they are easy to find on Google or Bing. Look at photos on their sites, the language they use – look how much fun they make volunteering sound, or how they make volunteering sound like a challenge worthy of traveling thousands of miles for – and paying top dollar to experience. Now look at your organization’s web site: how does your agency talk about volunteers and the activities they do? Don’t oversell your program, but do recognize that any activity that allows volunteers to be outside, to be very physical, or to interact with clients are highly desired by many people. What you may see as just more work to do they may see as an opportunity to make a real difference in a cause they care about deeply.

Here’s more of my advice on volunteer recruitment:

And here’s more of my blogs regarding voluntourism and Westerners going to help abroad:

My voluntourism-related & ethics-related blogs (and how I define scam)

Read more about my consulting services and training work.

More Than Me scandal in Liberia: a lesson to all who “just want to help”

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Katie Meyler of the USA wanted to save girls in Liberia from sexual exploitation, to educate them, empower them, keep them safe. She founded a charity called More Than Me and quickly raised more than $8 million for her efforts. The first More Than Me project multiplied quickly to 19 schools teaching 4,000 students. When the Liberian president, who had won a Nobel Peace Prize for her fight for women’s safety, was asked what she wanted from those keen to help her country, she answered, “To expand Katie Meyler’s initiative to as many communities as possible.” Meyler rubbed shoulders with Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey, and even get invited to the Obama White House.

Yet many of the girls in the program were regularly raped by a high-level MTM staff member, who was never vetted and rarely supervised in his interactions with girls. Victims told authorities and the media that he threatened to take away their scholarships or even kill them if they reported him.

The first school launched byMore Than Me was staffed in large part by year-long American “teaching fellows,” volunteers who were each asked to fundraise or pay $10,000 to participate. Except for one position, teaching experience wasn’t required, nor was a criminal background check – applicants just had to show they were an “innovative, out-of-the-box thinker and risk-taker” and include a video demonstrating they were “on fire with passion.” And, of course, have the money to pay. One of the first volunteers tried to sound the alarm and mismanagement and lack of appropriate safety systems at the organization, drafting a document highlighting the risks the organization was taking regarding financial management and children’s safety. The organization did create a written policy which said staff members were required to report child abuse to the organization, but in a country where sex for grades and other school-based exploitation were prevalent, the charity had no procedures for how to do so, and did not train staff about what reporting would look like.

Instead of helping girls, this program has irreparably harmed many. It put girls into the path of a serial predator and ignored warning signs about such. And many thousands of dollars are unaccounted for.

If you want to go abroad, with no experience, just a good heart, to help others, and you don’t yet know about the horror show that is More Than Me in Liberia, you need to read up. The ProPublica piece that exposed More Than Me is worth your time.

As this article from the Nonprofit Quarterly notes about the More Than Me scandal:

Cases like More Than Me’s underline the importance of context and relevant experience. Anyone with the most basic understanding of the social dynamics in Liberia or any other post-conflict situation would have known that sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) was a huge problem and not taken it for granted. The inexperience of Katie Meyler has been remarked upon and shows clearly through her handling of this crisis. White saviorism also thrives on the porn of poverty that freezes affected countries into essentialized images and relations of dependence from which they struggle to recover. But equally dangerous is its instrumentality as a facade for the less than honorable activities of some so-called humanitarians. There can be no sustainable reform of humanitarianism unless the world puts heads together to block the unintended consequences of humanitarianism.

Why am I so hard on people that post to forums or write me directly and say, “I have a good heart and a love of adventure and want to help poor kids in other countries!”? Why am I even harder on organizations that say, “Pay us this amount of money and we’ll let you help in our orphanage abroad – no need for any special skills or a criminal background check!”? This is a perfect example as to why. Yes, I am abrupt and demanding with people that posts such messages to fora or directly to me – and I will continue to do so.

And it’s not just abroad: I frequently come into contact with programs right here in Oregon that do not have any written policies about preventing and reporting inappropriate behavior by staff, volunteers or clients, and have no training for staff, volunteers or clients on what inappropriate behavior is and what reporting looks like. And when I try to bring this up, however gently, prefaced by lots of compliments to the program for producing such great results, I hear “We haven’t had any problems with inappropriate behavior.” And my response is always the same, “How do you know?”

Four things I wish every person knew who wants to go abroad and help, and every organization knew that wants to fund efforts to help people abroad:

  • Having a good heart and passion for a cause will not make your organization immune to corruption, mismanagement, harassment of clients or sexual abuse.
  • Any nonprofit, charity or government effort to help people should always put the clients, their priorities and their safety FIRST, below whatever organizational, program or personal brand you are trying to establish.
  • Local people that you want to help, even children, get a say in how you are going to help them, a say in what the organizational and funding priorities should be, and a priority for when they complain about something that threatens themselves, their family or their community.
  • Your goal, as much as possible, is to build the capacity of those local people to eventually lead and staff these activities themselves WITHOUT YOU.

The backlash against humanitarians working abroad with children, including volunteers (voluntourism), is coming. Are you ready? Also see: Nepal’s children at risk: Sexual abuse in the aid sector.

Also see:

research on why NGOs recruit international volunteers

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I am a frequent blogger about voluntourism – mostly to say, “Don’t do it – don’t pay to volunteer for two-weeks abroad. It’s not only ineffective, it’s potentially, sometimes actually, harmful.” Most recently, earlier this year, I blogged about volunteers themselves speaking out about voluntourism. I so appreciate these honest accounts of people who have paid to volunteer abroad and found the experience lacking in terms of actually helping local people or the environment – and even found it to be harmful.

My consulting colleague, sometimes presentation partner and all-around amazing human Dr. Erin Barnhardt wrote about her own experience as a pay-to-volunteer-abroad experience in her 2012 PhD thesis, Engaging Global Service: Organizational Motivations for and Perceived Benefits of Hosting International Volunteers. She notes in the introduction to her research:

While my experience in Jordan was on the whole overwhelmingly positive, I was surprised and somewhat disappointed to discover that I was in fact a largely ineffective volunteer. I knew that staying for only two weeks meant that my contributions would be severely limited and that my lack of Arabic language skills would further hamper my impact, but I’d assumed that coming in with a professional expertise meant that I could make some kind of lasting contribution during my very short tenure. What I discovered though was, despite having gone through a reputable volunteer-sending organization to an organization that regularly hosted international volunteers, the infrastructure to put me to work was minimal and somewhat ad hoc. I came to the Jordanian NGO with a genuine interest in helping out, only to discover that there was in fact little for me to do.

I so appreciate Erin’s honesty – and the honesty of all those who have paid-to-volunteer abroad and are now speaking out about their negative experiences.

Erin’s academic research after her Jordan experience came from her desire to know why some NGOs recruit volunteers from other countries. Erin’s research started with an initial survey of 248 NGOs that are not based in the USA and host international volunteers – people from outside of country of the location of the host NGO. Then she conducted a more in-depth survey of 31 NGOs from that group or 18.8% of the original 248. I wish she had limited her research to what I’m most interested in: those programs where volunteers are required to pay a fee to a volunteer-sending organization or to the host NGO – perhaps someone else will do that. Erin’s research was much broader: she looked at a range of NGOs, including those that do NOT charge any fees from volunteers. In fact, a majority of NGOs that responded to Erin’s surveys do not charge fees from volunteers, only 13.3% partnered with a volunteer-sending organization and just 8.5% had international volunteers placed with them by other kinds of partner organizations such as universities and faith groups. In addition, just 37.1% of responding organizations said international volunteers pay them a fee to volunteer with their organization. In addition, the survey was limited to NGOs who had registered on the Idealist.org web site, which means these NGOs are quite tech-savvy and independent – two qualities I don’t think are had by most local NGOs that host international volunteers in pay-to-volunteer-abroad schemes.

With all that said, the research is worth reading, to see how Internet-savvy, independent NGOs view international volunteers and the services they provide. I see these NGOs in Erin’s research as the kind of organizations that I recommend DIY volunteers abroad try to partner with when they want to travel and do good.

Here are some items from her research that are especially interesting – at least to me, because I think that these three findings would very likely be true of research that was limited to programs where international volunteers are charged a fee for their service:

  • Just over half of respondents – 50.4% – reported that they began hosting international volunteers only within the past five years, while 78.3% of respondents began hosting international volunteers within the past decade.
  • Overall, respondents reported that shorter terms of service were more common for their international volunteers than longer terms. For example, while 69.2% of respondents reported that international volunteers almost always or occasionally served for between 67 two weeks and one month, just over half as many reported having international volunteers almost always or occasionally stay for over one year.
  • Types of volunteer projects and roles varied widely with, by far, the most common type being teaching, classroom assistance, tutoring, and/or community education (61.3%). The next most common types of volunteer projects were construction and/or infrastructure development or improvements like painting, installations, etc. (17.8%), technology tasks like building websites (15.6%), and research, data collection, and reporting (12.4%).

I so hope someone out there will do similar research specifically on programs where volunteers are required to pay a fee to a volunteer-sending organization or to the host NGO. I hope they will take the research even farther and find out:

  • who identifies assignments for international volunteers (does the NGO define the assignment, do potential volunteers say “Here is how I would like to help and what I can do,” or does the volunteer sending agency say, “Here are volunteers and how you will use them”?)
  • not only if applicants need to meet minimal skills requirements, but how those requirements are verified
  • if the programs have written policies and procedures regarding sexual harassment and safety
  • what percentage of overall applicants that have the ability to pay are rejected from service by the agency, and what the reasons for those rejections are
  • how many of these agencies have conducted formal evaluations with resulting documentation regarding the impact these volunteers have on the agency or those that the agency services – not just satisfaction surveys among volunteers.

I would also love to know more about the process local NGOs must go through to request long-term international volunteers from

There is such a thing as effective short-term international volunteering. There is such a thing as quality program where volunteers need to pay a fee to the host organization. In fact, there are volunteering abroad programs where volunteers pay nothing, such as UN Volunteers, VSO and PeaceCorps – but such programs require a much, much longer commitment of volunteers than a few weeks.

My other blogs related to voluntourism:

Volunteers themselves speaking out about voluntourism

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There are few things more cringeworthy than watching 20 British schoolgirls trying to build a well under the scalding Nepalese heat. This is what I imagine a group of local men were thinking as they politely stood back while we puzzled our way through this contraption. The orphans peered through the windows, somewhat accustomed to this strange set-up. An unnecessary number of hours later, a ceremony took place thanking us for our hard work. We had singlehandedly brought clean water to this poor, desperate orphanage. We could fly home better people.

This scathing comment is from an editorial called DUCK expeditions are a load of quack published in the Palatinate, the official student newspaper of Durham University in the UK. The blog is an honest account of voluntourism by someone who, as a young teen, went abroad, thinking she her good heart but complete lack of expertise was what a poor community abroad needed and wanted. I applaud her for coming forward when she realized what her voluntourism experience had really been, in terms of helping and impact abroad.

In addition, via link on Reddit, I found a blog from 2015, by a young woman in Germany whose hope for a voluntourism experience to help turtles actually became torture for them:

“The ‘turtle conservation program’ was shut down after the police came (there is a law in Fiji to protect turtles as they are threatened by extinction). A girl made a… ehh… Let’s say critical Facebook post. I think ‘inhuman’ and ‘animal torture’ were some of the words she used… I’m just glad that I got my money back without any problem because I know about 7 people who had to go to court to get some of their money back because the agencies made a lot of great promises without keeping them. What they offer is not really volunteer work, here they call it voluntourism. A lot of money which doesn’t actually help anybody but just finances the international agencies. I got quite disillusioned about volunteering here. I left the volunteer house as soon as possible and went to a resort. The turtles were set free, but they are probably dead because they have been in the tank for too long and weren’t able to survive anymore. I’m so sorry for them.”

I did reach out to the author and, indeed, she exists and this was her experience. In an email to me last month, she noted:

I must say that I really regret not following through on that whole thing after I got the full amount back. I should have addressed that magazine to publish the whole story or the topic, or at least have given public critics, but I was 18, alone in Fiji and everything was very exciting… I was just too distracted with all that comes with starting university. So I am happy to hear that somebody actually does address that topic…

I appreciate these young people speaking out – it’s NOT easy. These are people who really did want to do the right thing, and while their attempt at voluntourism ended up being wasteful or even destructive, their voice now IS doing the right thing, and I applaud them.

But it’s not just people who paid to volunteer who are speaking out – it’s also people who were exploited:

The support of orphanages has created a thriving industry in which children are separated from their families and subjected to terrible abuse and neglect, as I was — being used as a commodity to generate funding… Having these adults coming in and out of our lives felt like we were continuously being abandoned.

This statement is from Sinet Chan, who grew up in a Cambodian orphanage and has pleaded with Australians not to donate to or volunteer at orphanages. Her quote is from this article about the push in Australia to make ‘orphanage tourism’ illegal.

I’m not letting up on this issue. The ability to pay and having a good heart should NOT qualify someone to hold orphans and take selfies in Africa, or wash elephants, or hand out food to refugees. If you want to help abroad, then get involved locally; you shouldn’t feel that you have the expertise to do something abroad – work with at-risk youth, help animals, help refugees, etc. – unless you have experience doing it locally, in your own country, preferably in your own community.

There is such a thing as effective short-term international volunteering. And it is NOT impossible to break into humanitarian work. And caring about people and animals abroad is a great quality to have. But taking action abroad needs to come from a place from respect and knowledge.

July 8, 2018 update: My consulting colleague and all-around amazing human Dr. Erin Barnhardt wrote about her own experience as a pay-to-volunteer-abroad experience in her 2012 PhD thesis, Engaging Global Service: Organizational Motivations for and Perceived Benefits of Hosting International Volunteers. She notes in the introduction to her research:

While my experience in Jordan was on the whole overwhelmingly positive, I was surprised and somewhat disappointed to discover that I was in fact a largely ineffective volunteer. I knew that staying for only two weeks meant that my contributions would be severely limited and that my lack of Arabic language skills would further hamper my impact, but I’d assumed that coming in with a professional expertise meant that I could make some kind of lasting contribution during my very short tenure. What I discovered though was, despite having gone through a reputable volunteer-sending organization to an organization that regularly hosted international volunteers, the infrastructure to put me to work was minimal and somewhat ad hoc. I came to the Jordanian NGO with a genuine interest in helping out, only to discover that there was in fact little for me to do.

I so appreciate Erin’s honesty – and the honesty of all people who have paid-to-volunteer abroad and are now speaking out about it.

July 16, 2018 update: When volun-tourism isn’t all it’s cracked up to be’ – ‘It was pretty much a zoo’: The conditions came to light by Amanda Rowland, 21, an upset and unhappy volunteer who had paid over $3000 to visit the centre in in Malaysia for a month in January. Amanda had been sold the trip as a chance to work at a temporary holding facility for orangutans rescued from illegal possession.

May 31, 2019: Chase and JP Morgan has a commercial to encourage financial planning that promotes volunteerism with wildlife: a happy couple gushes about their volunteer trip abroad scrubbing elephants’ feet and further gush how they would like to make that trip every year from now on, and their financial advisor is happy to oblige. So disappointing to see these two companies promote such a highly unethical and harmful practice!

My other blogs on this subject:

Voluntourism is fighting back

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I have voluntourism in my Google Alerts, so that I can get links to press releases, news articles that mention the term. I’m not fond of voluntourism, where volunteers pay large amounts of money to go abroad for a few weeks, or even several weeks, to engage in a short-term activity that will give them a sense of helping people, animals or the environment. I look at this growing industry with great skepticism in terms of actually helping anyone, because it’s focused on the wants of the volunteer – that feel-good, often highly photogenic experience – not the critical local needs of local people or the environment, and there’s little screening of volunteers – most everyone is taken, so long as they can pay. What these foreigners bring through these voluntourism programs is often not skills, experience or capabilities that cannot be found locally – it’s money, and I see no evidence that this money benefits local people – maybe the people that run the program are “helped”, but not those meant to be helped by the volunteers. I don’t think all pay-to-volunteer schemes are horrid, and I don’t think creating a vacation that has a social or environmental “good” goal (transire benefaciendo) is a bad thing, but I think there are a tremendous number of voluntourism programs out there that aren’t really benefitting communities in the developing world – and some are actually causing harm. I push back to questions about and posts prompting voluntourism on Quora and Reddit, and I’ve been pleased to see more and more people doing the same. That push-back must be working, because now I’m also seeing a lot of voluntourism companies aggressively fighting back on the blogosphere, asserting that their programs are worthwhile (but never offering hard data to prove it).

I’ve been happy to see the tide turning against many forms of voluntourism as people realize that work abroad should make local people the number one priority, not the feel-good experience for a foreign volunteer. For instance, Australian NGOs are refusing to place volunteers in orphanages abroad, because of the exploitation of children, potential harm to children, and lack of any data showing such voluntourism helps children at all.

The UK’s International Citizen Service (ICS), which has placed thousands of young people in volunteer roles around the world, is now under scrutiny: Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) has taken action against ICS and other members of the UK consortium of organizations providing volunteering opportunities over safety concerns. The UK’s Department for International Development (DFID), according to a report by VSO, regarded ICS as a “high-risk programme due to the security and safety issues” involved.  “ICS safeguarding incidents have included death by drowning of two volunteers, sexual assaults, and the detention of volunteers by local police.” Volunteers live and work in countries where they may be exposed to petty and violent crime, political instability, endemic diseases and natural disasters.

There’s even a growing backlash against medical voluntourism, per reporting by Noelle Sullivan, a member of the faculty in global health studies at Northwestern University, who says her research shows that some people volunteering abroad for a few weeks, or several weeks, to engage in medical “help” for people in developing countries “does indeed cause harm.

It must be taking its toll, because I got a link to a press release about how a certain African “foundation” has hired a PR agency “to change the public perception of medical volunteering or voluntourism.” I’m not going to link to the press release – no free publicity here for a for-profit marketing company. But I had a look at the “foundation”‘s web site. The site is mostly about the gorgeous “luxury” accommodations for volunteers on a game reserve, whcih has an onsite gym, an infinity pool, a private patio “for stargazing,” and nearby opportunities for hiking, mountain biking, golfing, weight training, yoga, abseiling, white river rafting, tubing, kloofing, microlighting, helicopter rides, “and hot air ballooning!” The company can hook volunteers up with wildlife photography tours and photography courses, half day trips to an animal rehabilitation center “featured on National Geographic,” and visits for “pampering yourself at the local spas.” I’m surprised there aren’t workshops provided on how to take the perfect “Look how I’m helping these poor people” selfies… Oh, there is a page or two about the medical services volunteers will squeeze into their busy schedule enjoying all that hiking and hot air ballooning.

Update: a blog from 2015, where animal “help” becomes animal “torture”

“The ‘turtle conservation program’ was shut down after the police came (there is a law in Fiji to protect turtles as they are threatened by extinction). A girl made a… ehh… Let’s say critical Facebook post. I think ‘inhuman’ and ‘animal torture’ were some of the words she used… I’m just glad that I got my money back without any problem because I know about 7 people who had to go to court to get some of their money back because the agencies made a lot of great promises without keeping them. What they offer is not really volunteer work, here they call it voluntourism. A lot of money which doesn’t actually help anybody but just finances the international agencies. I got quite disillusioned about volunteering here. I left the volunteer house as soon as possible and went to a resort. The turtles were set free, but they are probably dead because they have been in the tank for too long and weren’t able to survive anymore. I’m so sorry for them.”

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