Voluntourism – Boon or bane?

Voluntourists need to be clear about their motive and travel with their eyes open, says SMU adjunct faculty Dr Sin Harng Luh

For the uninitiated, people become voluntourists when they work as volunteers to help the community living in the place they travel to while holidaying. It has been claimed that voluntourism helps draw people away from over-toured sites. It also addresses social inequities by alleviating poverty, and sustaining rural livelihoods by providing countryside dwellers with a reliable and sustainable income stream.

But for Dr Sin Harng Luh, an adjunct faculty with SMU, her 21-day voluntourism trip with a group of fellow students during her undergraduate days to a remote village in the Chinese province of Guangxi in 2002 did not exactly turn out the way they had envisioned. Recalls Dr Sin:

From the very first night we were there, we charged our mobile phones every night even though there was no mobile reception. We also brought along our laptops, digital cameras, and even a refrigerator. Unfortunately, we used up so much power the village experienced power failure every night. On the fourth night, the district mayor brought in a power generator the size of a minivan to support our power usage or else, maybe we might have been booted out of the village altogether.

She related this anecdote during her panel entitled “Saving the World One Holiday at a Time – except the Borders Are Shut” at the 6th Annual Wee Kim Wee Centre Soka International Seminar on Global Peace and Understanding.

To add insult to injury, Dr Sin adds that she and her group discovered that they were not particularly adept at construction work, which was what they had set out to do for the trip. In fact, the villagers were “immensely shocked” that the group could be “so bad” at something the villagers thought was “fairly straightforward and easy”. Humour aside, the incident is an excellent example of how “urban, over-educated folk” in Dr Sin’s own words can be humbled in their eagerness to do good on voluntourism trips.

BRIDGING PSYCHOLOGICAL AND CULTURAL DISTANCES

On a more serious note, Dr Sin highlights that academics believe tourism can help bridge the psychological and cultural distances between people if “properly designed and developed”. According to her, people often underestimate the role tourism can play in promoting and attaining global peace and understanding. They think that international organisations and diplomacy, as well as trade and commerce are key to achieving this. But the truth is tourism actually creates mundane spaces for interaction, and “travellers usually return with a renewed sense of wonder and curiosity of what is beyond our immediate surroundings”, she says.

As for voluntourism, it could offer a journey of self-discovery and learning for participants. More importantly, they get a peek into the lives of the locals they visit, and get to understand the latter’s rhythm of life, including what they do and their priorities. Also, they could benefit from the affective and emotional encounters during the trip.

However, voluntourism does have its detractors, the most prominent of whom is possibly J.K. Rowling. The author of the hugely popular Harry Potter children’s book series has openly called for young people to avoid embarking on voluntourism trips, saying that “orphanage tourism”, a form of voluntourism, is in fact fuelling child abuse and trafficking. In fact, a large number children living in the orphanages somewhere like Cambodia are not orphans at all, instead they typically have poverty-stricken parents, and they have been entered these institutions as bait for foreign donations and voluntourists.

A PRODUCT OF IMBALANCES

For Dr Sin, voluntourism is inherently problematic as it reflects the broader neoliberalisation of ethics and responsibility in society today. Explaining the roots of this phenomenon, she says:

Previously, development aid was primarily the state’s business and it was then conceived as institutional projects. In recent years, however, development has become depoliticised, and it is now rendered as a challenge for individuals and communities to overcome poverty.

So voluntourism is now the individualisation of mainstream development practice, such that voluntourists are “ideal providers of development in a world that seemingly forgets that there are structures of global capitalism that perpetuate global poverty and inequity”. In fact, voluntourism is a product of these imbalances.

A related phenomenon called “white saviourism”, which refers to white people helping non-whites, often to make the white people feel better about themselves, is making matters worse. It is therefore not surprising that right up until before the Covid-19 pandemic, there had been a rapid expansion of opportunities for volunteers from the Global North to take part in development aid projects.

Nevertheless, it needs to be recognised like most things in life, voluntourism has both its pros and cons. What is important is that people have to decide for themselves: when embarking on such a trip, are they doing so out of a genuine desire to help the community in question, or are they merely letting themselves be manipulated into experiencing “feel-good” emotions, so that travel agencies can make money out of their wanting to do good?

TRAVELLING IN THE TIME OF COVID-19

In concluding her panel, Dr Sin draws attention to how tourism as we know it has been transformed, perhaps forever. Contrasting the steep decline in the number of flights being operated after the pandemic took root with the pre-pandemic situation, she points out that the borders of many countries continue to be semi-shut. And whereas places like Singapore and Hong Kong had boasted of having among the world’s busiest airports before Covid-19 struck, air traffic is now highest in the U.S. and China. This is due to both economic giants having a huge domestic travel market to support internal travel demand, but what is notable is that the number of cross-border flights remains a pittance.

Just before closing, she flashed a photograph taken at Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve shortly after the Causeway was closed to stem a growing Covid-19 infection wave in March 2020. It features not a bird or an animal, but instead a view of Johor Bahru across the Strait of Johor. Pre-pandemic, citizens of both Singapore and Malaysia had taken for granted the ease with which they could travel to the other side. But assuming if and when the pandemic ends, she asks, “Will we know how to travel like before? Would the ‘wonder’ ever return?”  Well, when the time comes, hopefully we would be able to answer these questions in the affirmative.   

Dr Sin Harng Luh was a panellist at the 6th Annual Wee Kim Wee Centre Soka International Seminar on Global Peace and Understanding, which was held on 20 January 2022. The seminar was organised by SMU Office of Core Curriculum and Wee Kim Wee Centre, with the support of Soka Gakkai Singapore.

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