The Dark Side of Volunteer Tourism

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Poolside in Lilongwe, the conversations were more finely tuned: Whom have you helped? How have you grown? A ranking emerged. Living in a rural village (no pool) beat living in the city. A project in which you might see someone die was a few cuts above, say, computer-skills training.

I held the trump card. I was in Malawi to set up a creative writing program. For orphans. In jail. Even to my own ears it sounded like I was trying to get laid.

Am I being unkind? Maybe. But if I engage in some healthy mockery, I am also mocking myself. I was just another do-gooder splashing my own tablespoon of water onto the fires of hell.

I won’t ruin your day by going on about the conditions in the Kachere Juvenile Centre, the jail for kids in Lilongwe, because an excellent book is already available: Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens (“where 20 or 30 juvenile offenders against the poor-laws rolled about the floor all day, without the inconvenience of too much food or too much clothing”). I’ll limit myself to one detail. On the day I visited, the boys were paisley. After more than a month without soap in hot, dirty, and crowded conditions, whorls of fungus blossomed on their skin.

I hadn’t gone to the jail looking to do good. It’s an impulse I’ve always dis­trusted. But then what was I going to do about the paisley boys? Go home and literally let them rot?

I handed out some soap, and that was the start of it all.

Some dismiss volunteer tourism as “a morally seductive adaptation of modern mass tourism,” as it was called in an international studies conference earlier this year. Many volunteer projects serve the egos of the tourists more effectively than they serve the locals. Even the idea that it creates a pool of people committed to ending global poverty is questionable. At least as many come home with their optimism in tatters.

We debated all of these issues between laps in the pool. The closest I’ve come to conclusions can be reduced to three. First, nothing is likely to stop the increase in person-to-person contact between people of the richer nations and people of the poorer. Second, there is much to be gained on both sides from this exchange. Third, those gains will be made through a series of small, personal, humbling errors.

Many of the favorite stories at poolside were of this nature. There were the usual language mix-ups: ordering chamba (marijuana) instead of chambo (a kind of fish), or emphasizing the wrong syllable in the Chichewa word for ancestors so that it came out as testicles. It was also routine to hear that people had gotten hopelessly tangled in mosquito nets, and found themselves lost in the bush only to be saved—and laughed at—by children.

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