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Friday Sep 08, 2006
Volunteers or colonialists?
A few weeks ago overseas volunteering charity VSO kicked off a brief media panic about young people wasting their gap years.
"Some gap year providers seem to pay little attention to whether young people are actually making any long-term difference to the communities they are working in,"...said [Judith Brodie of VSO]. "It's an 'all about us' attitude. There seems to be a colonial attitude, whereby it is assumed that just because a young person is from the UK, they will be of benefit to their host community."
The Guardian asked volunteers what they thought and there were plenty of concerns, especially about volunteers without specific skills.
For someone interested in volunteering overseas, assessing the worth of organisations is a tough challenge . You can read all the information and speak to lots of other people but ultimately you are going to have to venture into the unknown (normally at a considerable cost).
It would be great if organisations could be regulated so that people knew that there contribution would be worthwhile but overseas development is such a complicated and controversial area that it's difficult to see how anything other than the most basic regulation can happen.
On YouthNet's volunteering website, do-it.org.uk, we (with a few exceptions) only list overseas volunteering organisations that are UK-based registered charities – that, at least, gives some measure of official approval. Hearing about other people's experiences is also incredibly useful – that's why do-it has an overseas volunteering blog. This post from is a reminder of what a great experience it can be.
I could write a million things about what we experienced in Nepal. Sitting on the floor and eating rice with our hands, Danni's beautiful open-air concert in Durbar Square, the elephants who's bristly thick skin made them appear a bit like giant long-nosed pigs, Paul's little fan club who he carried about, one on each arm... The football club, playing games with the little ones in Kathmandu, being fooled in to believing we have lice by the girls in Hetauda. Nepal was an experience none of us will ever forget.
Posted by Tom Green ( 10:08 AM ) Link to this post Comments[0]