What is "Voluntourism"?

This new "controversial" term/issue has arisen recently and is being widely debated.
As a Haiti volunteer, what do you think?
Have you witnessed this phenomenon in Haiti?
Have you ever been a Voluntourist?
Do you feel this issue should be included in any sustainability discussion?
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#InstagrammingAfrica: The Narcissism of Global Voluntourism
The Society Pages
By Lauren Kascak & Sayantani DasGupta • June 19, 2014 • 2:00 PM

An article in The Onion mocks voluntourism, joking that a six-day visit to a rural African village can “completely change a woman’s Facebook profile picture.”  The article quotes “22-year-old Angela Fisher” who says:

    I don’t think my profile photo will ever be the same, not after the experience of taking such incredible pictures with my arms around those small African children’s shoulders.

It goes on to say that Fisher “has been encouraging every one of her friends to visit Africa, promising that it would change their Facebook profile photos as well.”

I was once Angela Fisher. But I’m not any more.

I HAVE PARTICIPATED IN not one but three separate, and increasingly disillusioning, international health brigades, short-term visits to developing countries that involve bringing health care to struggling populations.

Such trips—critically called voluntourism—are a booming business, even though they do very little advertising and charge people thousands of dollars to participate.

How do they attract so many paying volunteers?

Photography is a big part of the answer. Voluntourism organizations don’t have to advertise, because they can crowdsource. Photography—particularly the habit of taking and posting selfies with local children—is a central component of the voluntourism experience. Hashtags like #InstagrammingAfrica are popular with students on international health brigades, as are #medicalbrigades, #globalhealth, and of course the nostalgic-for-the-good-days hashtag #takemeback.

It was the photographs posted by other students that inspired me to go on my first overseas medical mission. When classmates uploaded the experience of themselves wearing scrubs beside adorable children in developing countries, I believed I was missing out on a pivotal pre-med experience. I took over 200 photos on my first international volunteer mission. I modeled those I had seen on Facebook and even pre-meditated photo opportunities to acquire the “perfect” image that would receive the most Likes.

Over time, I felt increasingly uncomfortable with the ethics of those photographs, and ultimately left my camera at home. Now, as an insider, I see three common types of photographs voluntourists share through social media: The Suffering Other, The Self-Directed Samaritan, and The Overseas Selfie.

THE SUFFERING OTHER

In a photograph taken by a fellow voluntourist in Ghana (not shown), a child stands isolated with her bare feet digging in the dirt. Her hands pull up her shirt to expose an umbilical hernia, distended belly, and a pair of too-big underwear. Her face is uncertain and her scalp shows evidence of dermatological pathology or a nutritional deficiency—maybe both. Behind her, only weeds grow.
Anthropologists Arthur and Joan Kleinman note that images of distant, suffering women and children suggest there are communities incapable of or uninterested in caring for its own people. These photographs justify colonialist, paternalistic attitudes and policies, suggesting that the individual in the photograph …

… must be protected, as well as represented, by others. The image of the subaltern conjures up an almost neocolonial ideology of failure, inadequacy, passivity, fatalism, and inevitability. Something must be done, and it must be done soon, but from outside the local setting. The authorization of action through an appeal for foreign aid, even foreign intervention, begins with an evocation of indigenous absence, an erasure of local voices and acts.

THE SELF-DIRECTED SAMARITAN

Here we have a smiling young white girl with a French braid, medical scrubs, and a well-intentioned smile. This young lady is the centerpiece of the photo; she is its protagonist. Her scrubs suggest that she is doing important work among those who are so poor, so vulnerable, and so Other.
The girl is me. And the photograph was taken on my first trip to Ghana during a 10-day medical brigade. I’m beaming in the photograph, half towering and half hovering over these children. I do not know their names, they do not know my name, but I directed a friend to capture this moment with my own camera. Why?
This photograph is less about doing actual work and more about retrospectively appearing to have had a positive impact overseas. Photographs like these represent the overseas experience in accordance with what writer Teju Cole calls the “White Savior Industrial Complex.”
Moreover, in directing, capturing, and performing in photos such as these, voluntourists prevent themselves from actually engaging with the others in the photo. In On Photography, Susan Sontag reminds us:

Photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing – which means that…it is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power.

On these trips, we hide behind the lens, consuming the world around us with our powerful gazes and the clicking of camera shutters. When I directed this photo opportunity and starred in it, I used my privilege to capture a photograph that made me feel as though I was engaging with the community. Only now do I realize that what I was actually doing was making myself the hero/star in a story about “suffering Africa.”

THE OVERSEAS SELFIE

In his New York Times Op-Ed, that modern champion of the selfie James Franco wrote:

Selfies are avatars: Mini-Me’s that we send out to give others a sense of who we are…. In our age of social networking, the selfie is the new way to look someone right in the eye and say, “Hello, this is me.”

Although related to the Self-Directed Samaritan shot, there’s something extra-insidious about this type of super-close range photo. “Hello, this is me” takes on new meaning—there is only one subject in this photo, the white subject. Capturing this image and posting it on the Internet is to understand the Other not as a separate person who exists in the context of their own family or community. but rather as a prop, an extra, someone only intelligible in relation to the Western volunteer.

VOLUNTOURISM IS ULTIMATELY ABOUT the fulfillment of the volunteers themselves, not necessarily what they bring to the communities they visit. In fact, medical volunteerism often breaks down existing local health systems. In Ghana, I realized that local people weren’t purchasing health insurance, since they knew there would be free foreign health care and medications available every few months. This left them vulnerable in the intervening times, not to mention when the organization would leave the community.

In the end, the Africa we voluntourists photograph isn’t a real place at all. It is an imaginary geography whose landscapes are forged by colonialism, as well as a good deal of narcissism. I hope my fellow students think critically about what they are doing and why before they sign up for a short-term global volunteer experience. And if they do go, it is my hope that they might think with some degree of narrative humility about how to de-center themselves from the Western savior narrative. Most importantly, I hope they leave their iPhones at home.
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Lauren Kascak is a graduate of the Masters Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University, where Sayantani DasGupta is a faculty member. DasGupta is the editor of Stories of Illness and Healing and the author of The Demon Slayers and Other Stories and Her Own Medicine.                                         

India's campaign to build toilets is failing

Can Haiti learn from another country's experiences?
Do we take some things here in the U.S., our lives for granted?
Ineffective quick fixes?
Is clean water putting the cart before the horse?
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BY KARTIKAY MEHROTRA
Bloomberg News
Saturday, September 6, 2014

Sunita's family in the north Indian village of Mukimpur were given their first toilet in February, one of millions being installed by the government to combat disease. She can't remember the last time anyone used it.

When nature calls, the 26-year-old single mother and her four children head toward the jungle next to their farm of red and pink roses, to a field of tall grass, flecked with petals, where the 7,000 people of her village go to defecate and exchange gossip.

Only dalits, the lowest Hindu caste, should be exposed to excrement in a closed space, "or city-dwellers who don't have space to go in the open," said Sunita, who uses one name. "Feces don't belong under the same roof as where we eat and sleep."

Sunita's view reveals one of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's biggest challenges in combating the world's biggest sanitation problem, one that costs India 600,000 lives annually from diarrhea and exposes a third of the nation's women to the risk of rape or sexual assault.

"Targets for construction of toilets are somewhat irrelevant to resolving the sanitation problem," said Yamini Aiyar, director of policy research group Accountability Initiative in New Delhi. "Building toilets does not mean that people will use them, and there seems to be a host of cultural, social and caste-based reasons for that. People need to be taught the value of sanitation."

In most cases, that isn't happening. More than half of the country's sanitation education budget since 1999 hasn't been spent, according to the Ministry of Drinking Water & Sanitation. In at least five of India's poorest states, the majority of people in households with a government latrine don't use it.

The government has set Mahatma Gandhi's 150th birthday in 2019 as its target for achieving "total sanitation," including access to toilets for all 1.2 billion residents, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said. While Jaitley doubled spending on new toilets, the ratio of those funds that can be spent on information, education and communication remains at 15 percent.

Of the 18.3 billion rupees set aside for that purpose in the past 15 years, only 45 percent has been used, partly because local authorities can't get more funds until they prove how they spent the previous year's money and partly because the central government often simply ran out of cash, said Avani Kapur, an analyst with New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research.

"While villagers remain ignorant of the dangers, about 100,000 tons of their excrement heads to markets every day on fruit and vegetables, according to Unicef, the United Nation's children's fund. Each gram of feces in an open field contains 10 million viruses, 1 million bacteria and 1,000 parasite cysts.

The excrement contaminates groundwater, causing illnesses such as diarrhea and cholera, and deters tourists whose immune systems are at the highest risk from the drug-resistant strains of fecal bacteria, according to the World Bank report.

For women, heading to the fields alone raises the risk of assault, a danger that gained international attention in May when two girls from the village of Badaun in Uttar Pradesh were raped and hanged from a mango tree after they went to defecate outdoors.

"This vicious, horrifying attack illustrates too vividly the risks that girls and women take when they don't have a safe, private place to relieve themselves," said Barbara Frost, the London-based chief executive of WaterAid, a charity that helps poor communities get access to sanitation. "Ending open defecation is an urgent priority."

India accounts for about 60 percent of the world's residents without toilets, according to a report released in May by the World Health Organization and Unicef. The country's 50 percent open defecation rate compares with 23 percent in Pakistan, 3 percent in Bangladesh and 1 percent in China, the report said.

India's previous government in 2012 created a five-year "Sanitation and Hygiene Advocacy and Communication Strategy Framework" to advise states on how to counter the culture of open defecation, including setting up local education committees.

Health Minister Harsh Vardhan said more needs to be done by government and private agencies to build national awareness of the dangers of poor sanitation.

India spent 2.6 billion rupees in fiscal 2013 on a campaign to help eradicate polio after 44 cases were reported between 2010 and 2011, according to the World Health Organization. In the same year, the nation spent half that amount on education for toilets and sanitation.

Some rural residents are constructing their own latrines. In Saunda, a village of about 6,000 people, 30 miles northeast of New Delhi, 70-year-old Hemraj Kumar sits on a cot near his new porcelain toilet.

The rest of the family still prefer to head to the field, including Hemraj's 20-year-old grandson Sonu, a college engineering student.

"Locking us inside these booths with our own filth? I will never see how that is clean," Sunita says, pointing to the field. "Going out there is normal."