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This is my issue with volunteer tourism and poverty porn. You do this work because YOU want to make it look like YOU are a good person and the work, whilst it may help people, is centred around you, your ego and your white saviour complex
I volunteered in Peru when I was 18 in a rural orphanage for a year,we frequently had groups of YT people come over to “help” when In fact the work that they did caused more harm then good.Unskilled people would come to ‘build’ structures but would do it wrong
This would then mean the orphanage would have to fork out their own funds to hire someone from the village to fix the work. They would allow the unskilled ‘volunteers’ to continue the work so to not hurt their ego
On Christmas Day we had an American family come to visit and give a bag of pencils, a toothbrush and a notepad.They wanted all the orphans to stand around in a circle and declare why they were orphaned to ‘earn’ their gift. It was disgusting
I had been working with the young people for 6 months at this point and had yet to hear many of their traumatic stories because I was still building a relationship with them. This family only wanted to hear the stories for their own egos “look at these poor kids we helped”
The orphanage director kicked them out. The end
Volunteer tourism grinds my gears because I’ve seen it first hand, It’s especially funny when these YT tourists first met me, they spoke down to me because they assumed I was one of the orphans. When I spoke back to them in English,they looked like they shit themselves
