The recent on-campus screening of Oil and Water, a movie about two boys confronting the exploitation of the natural resources of the indigenous communities in the Amazon in Ecuador, and its incorporation into this year’s summer readings and commencement speech, billed the movie as a vital partnership against a behemoth evil — big oil companies. The film’s website describes it as an “intimate portrait of two young people finding their voices and trying to beat incredible odds.”
But for me, as I sat through class discussions and speeches, I could only see it in stark binaries. David, the white kid from an affluent suburb in Massachusetts, walked into a small indigenous village and walked away with a world-class scholarship and an Ivy League education. Hugo struggled to relearn what it was his people needed from him after coming home from the United States unable to afford an American college education. But what was most problematic about the end of this movie is that the “solution” for the Amazon wasn’t coming from the Cofán tribe or even Hugo, but from David.
The on-campus discussion of this documentary failed to look critically at western aid to “underprivileged” communities and countries. Too often, these do-good missions promote exogenous solutions to community problems, perpetuating the western “saviorism” that has long tipped the balance of power towards northern hemisphere nations while deflecting attention away from the systemic problems prevalent in many nations that create the need for aid — many of which have been caused by the historic colonialism of western powers.
Volunteering worldwide is a powerful industry with an estimated 1 billion people volunteering per year and a workforce value of $1.348 trillion USD as of 2005. Unsurprisingly, a large portion of these volunteers come from OECD countries with some 55 million Americans having gone on a “volunteer vacation” as of 2004. While this industry is clearly a powerful economic and social force, it is important to look critically at what the effects of volunteering are in communities that receive volunteer-based aid.
At its worst, volunteering abroad can become “voluntourism,” a popular phenomenon among affluent travelers who want to do good while also touring the world in their leisure time. These seemingly innocuous short-term trips can often backfire when volunteers are faced with abject poverty or discover that they lack the practical knowledge of how to build basic infrastructure. In even worse iterations of volunteerism gone wrong, small-time industries have been created to cater to some tourist-volunteers’ desires to help orphans, the result of which is has often been forced orphanage for some children or the damaging severing of relationships between volunteers and the children, many of whom may already be in a precarious emotional state. In other instances, it can lead to the disruption of local economies and the displacement of local work opportunities.
On a larger level, this mentality belies a general lack of consideration for local community needs and perpetuates a preexisting power structure between people from the more privileged northern hemisphere and the comparatively less advantaged countries of the southern hemisphere. It can also dehumanize the recipients of aid. The framework that we currently have in place surrounding aid to countries and people who are “in need” casts more light on the givers of the aid and their individual virtues than the improvement that actually comes about from the work they do.
This is in part because many of our traditional models for volunteering, such as Peace Corps, were not intended to implement community-based solutions for global problems. Instead, Peace Corps was set forth as a “soft power” mechanism for combating the encroaching threat of communism — to spread the virtues of democracy to the far corners of the world by sending America’s “best resource.” Its goal was not to give the communities the help they requested but rather to help the communities in a way that best suited the spread of democracy and the detriment of communism. That is not to say that no good or needed services came out of the Peace Corps — they have and they still do. Rather, it is to highlight the fact that the focus of the good being done is not on those who are helped, but rather on those who are administering help in the way they see fit. We should therefore be wary about the organizations and personal motivations for volunteering. Oftentimes these structures perpetuate global power imbalances instead of alleviating them.
Similarly, other broad attempts to do good in the United States such as Teach For America can reinforce the racial and economic power imbalances already in place in a community and the country as a whole. Currently, Teach For America’s organizational structure caters to the long-term career advancement of its volunteers more than the tailored needs of the communities they serve. This can create tensions between veteran teachers and new TFA teachers in schools that are already in precarious places. The high turnover rate of TFA teachers also impedes the success of their students. These inadequacies configure TFA not as a place of education reform, but rather as a place where over-achieving and affluent post-grads can alleviate their sense of privilege by volunteering without necessarily meeting community needs and enacting lasting change.
Currently, our models of volunteering do not offer adequate space for communities to voice their own needs and perceptions of what the solutions to their problems would look like. There are certain movements that have recognized this need, such as the inclusion of Ngangkari healers in aboriginal community clinics in Australia who now work alongside doctors and medical staff when providing medical care to local communities. Although not a volunteer-based program, this model exemplifies the importance of maintaining community needs, standards, traditions and knowledge when entering and aiding a population of people.
While it is true that David Poritz ultimately created a new and innovative solution to the problems of a community he was deeply invested in, he was still leading the way towards the solutions. Hugo’s opinion and the Cofán voice in the matter were secondary. That Hugo had not yet found a solution to the problems of his tribe suggests that the approach David used might have even been premature. It is therefore crucial to understand that in order to truly help other nations and communities, western countries and their citizens can no longer see themselves as the primary sources of solutions.