The Raging Volunteerism Debate

A lively debate on the merits and demerits(?) of aid/development related volunteerism is occurring in the aid/development corner of the blogosphere. As a current international volunteer and erstwhile domestic (U.S.) volunteer, I basically have to blog about it too right?!

This is a multifaceted discussion, and this post would get boringly long if I tried to hit every point. In some parts of the debate, bloggers have treated volunteerism as a sort of systemic problem in the world of international aid and development. There's a better way to look at this issue!

Let me persuade you:

Several questions make up the core of the discussion:
What is volunteerism? Why do people volunteer? Are volunteers useful, useless or downright harmful to the orgs where they work? What are the defining relationships between volunteers, paid workers, amateurs and professionals? Why do orgs offer volunteer positions? And, as Crystal Hayling of the Center for Effective Philanthropy puts it, “Whose Volunteer Experience is this Anyway?"

In asking that last question, Hayling was asserting that volunteering should be an altruistic pursuit.
“It is not about you!” she imagined exclaiming to her friend who had planned a volunteer outing to Cambodia with her teenage kids, only to have the locals thwart their good time by taking leadership in a construction project away from the (oh so construction savvy?) teenagers. The kids were disappointed and turned off by volunteerism after the experience.

To Hayling, the idea that the kids would want control and decision making power in their volunteer experience indicated that something was wrong. They should have been doing it to help the locals, not for themselves.

I doubt anybody has ever embarked on a stint of volunteering with purely altruistic motives. Volunteer positions frequently offer perks like travel to distant lands, interactions with exotic cultures, and in a time of rising unemployment (in the U.S. anyway), something to do for a few months while you’re jobless anyway. The question that comes to mind is “what’s wrong with volunteering because of the benefits you can reap?”

citrus fire, food faves and a story

Sometimes Every day for six hours, the power goes out, and we chill in the dark. One time, we were romantically eating some oranges by candlelight and I divulged to my host dad (who already knew) and young host brother and sister that if you 'spritz an orange peel into a flame, the spritz will burn! So we played with fire. I especially like that Roshni just ate a really sour bite in the background, and is making a funny face!

A coconut cookie with peanut butter schmear and a pile of Craisins. We consumed almost a pound of peanut butter in this fashion on the trek to Gossaikund.

Here I am in the kitchen, eating a Mamri. This is the stuck-to-the-pan crust that is leftover from making a dish called Dhendo, which is just flour and water cooked into a sort of thick porridge. Since my host mom uses a huge bowl-shaped metal pan to cook, the Mamri comes out as a huge bowl. Before eating, we filled it (not the whole way) with fresh buffalo milk and honey from host dad's hives. And then I ate it! Truly, the land of Milk and Honey.

This is a wedge of yak cheese, bought straight from the maker, on the way back down from Gossaikund. That was a rock solid trip, foodwise.

How I ended up awkwardly averting my eyes from a semi pornographic motorcycle ad while sharing coffee with some Nepali NGO leaders:

Recently Micah (MCC Nepal Rep) organized an All Partner workshop, in which members of all the NGOs who partner (aka receive funding or volunteers) with MCC got together and had a bunch of meetings. The meetings were....well they were meetings. Nuff said.
However, we spent one morning of the workshop doing a service project, in which the twentyish NGO workers volunteered to help paint the courtyard walls of Elim Kids Academy, the school where Kelsey, the other Nepal SALTer, works. It was fun, and nice to get our hands dirty after hours of sitting in the conference room the day before. What happened after the painting was done was hilarious.
The painting only took a half day, and we had a whole afternoon of talking about MCC's financial reporting requirements ahead of us. I needed coffee. I asked Micah if he wanted to go to the 'lil bakery cafe' that I'd seen on the way to the conference place. He invited two of the honchos from the other NGOs, and we walked 100 yards down the dirt alleyway to the shop.
The place was belching christmas flavored smoke. There were probably fifteen hipster youth in the tiny cafe, all smoking "Blacks" clove cigarettes. Adding to the weird, brothelish demeanor of the shop were the two life sized fake skulls on the window sill, a pile of at least 300 packs of those same clove cigarettes in the shelves, and a HUGE poster of a naked woman straddling a motorcycle.
I don't know who decorated that place...but it felt pretty comical for me to be sitting there sipping instant coffee from plastic cups with these classy NGO dudes.
They kinda snickered, but didn't seem too perturbed. We bolted our coffee and left.