granted- in cuba i didn’t do any volunteer work, nor think i had the time.

i’m glad you don’t feel the need to apologize- you shouldn’t. but i do hope you find a couple cool causes worth spending a few days on. it’ll allow you to see & understand the cultures in a deeper way than just eating at local rest. & shopping at their markets.

i’m sooooo jealous! hopefully we will get our butts to somewhere on your trip. did i mention bryan got his passport, i’m suddenly hopeful!

This post and then the “Three Cups of Tea” example makes me think of an on-going debate in the field of academic scholarship. I’m not sure how wide the argument ranges, as I’m most familiar with it in regards to Rhetoric and Composition work. The debate is multi-faceted by mostly boils down to “what responsibility do we have to the people we are studying?” and “if there is a responsibility, what actions are appropriate?”

Say a person is doing ethnographic studies of an indigienous community, as are a number of people I know. Many argue, and many agree with this argument(as I do), that to only study these people — in other words, to take, take, take — without giving something back is both irresponsible and unethical. The question becomes complicated not by the “so what do you give back” but the slippery question of “does the academic model allow for such give-back time?” This quandry is often faced, for the first time, but graduate students writing dissertations. As Jeff has demonstrated to us, such work is accomplished on a more-than-tight schedule, a schedule that would allow for zero of this “give-back” time.

Seems that the current academic approach is to “plant a seed.” To try to give something back that you or someone else could return to later. In that sense, I agree with Amanda, in that I see you taking a slightly too cynical view on Volun-tourism. If the trip plants a seed, as opposed to providing a self-contained pat on the back, then good work has been done. On the other hand, I can see how someone else’s selfish intentions can lead to the cynical viewpoint you have arrived at.

The other point worth mentioning - which you allude to in your post -is the overhead costs associated with such trips. The bigger point is all volunteer and no-profit work includes such overhead. When this becomes a problem is when different organizations are replicating each other’s work while multiplying the overhead costs. The common example of this occurs when an athlete/celebrity wants to start an organization with his/her name on the organization. Too often the result is a copycat organization that becomes weighed down by the large percentage of funds it cannot return to the communities it is trying to help. In terms of volun-tourism the “plant the seed” aspect of the trip could be increased if there was more an emphasis on the communities and less on pleasing the vacationer (the consumer), which, in turn, might cut down on the overhead costs.

I think you can think whatever you want, but the point of this post wasn’t to defend why we aren’t doing volunteer work. Volunteering was never the point of our trip and will never be the point of our trip. We’re doing this to see the world, learn a few things, and have a good time. Period. No apologies.

We feel plenty comfortable about the ways we give back in our everyday life—both through volunteering our time and giving our money. I hope you do too.

Also, I’d like to recommend the book “Three Cups of Tea” if you haven’t read it. It’s about a man who goes to Pakistan on a climbing expedition and ends up getting a lot of aid from a local village. He then decides to thank them by building a school (he provides money and equipment, the village provides the labor). In the end what happens is that he begins a foundation that funds schools all over Pakistan and Afghanistan and also provides scholarships for villagers to go to university, become teachers, and return to teach in these schools. It’s a very inspirational book.