Volunteering tourism is a fast growing trend

The hours are long, the work can be back breaking and heart breaking. The conditions are often tough and on top of all that, you don't get paid. In fact, you may actually pay for the privilege. So, the question is, why would anyone give up their well earned holidays to shovel bear poo, teach English to orphans or pull ticks off scabies-ridden street dogs?For me, and many of the volunteers I've talked to, the stock standard reason for volunteering while travelling is about giving back to the communities you're visiting.

After zipping around the world a couple of times over the years, I'd had enough of sitting by pools sipping cocktails with those cute little umbrellas in them. I wanted to be a part of the communities I was in and help to make them better places.

School rooms

I decided to teach English, and signed up with Globalteer, a UK based charity which runs several different projects in Siem Reap, Cambodia.The village the 'school' was in was a hot and sweaty half hour bicycle ride away from Siem Reap.

One of the elders of the village had set up the school room in his house; one side of the square concrete box was the classroom, the other was the bedroom where the family of five slept in two beds.

There was no sewerage system and no running water, and the smoke from the cooking fires filled the room in the afternoons. Chickens, birds and the odd goat would wander in and out while I was teaching.Most of the children had lice, at least a dozen of the 85 or so kids were orphans who slept on the school desks at night. While it all sounds pretty sad and depressing, it was actually the opposite. The kids were incredibly happy, sweet, eager to learn and grateful for getting the chance.

They had no concept of the fact they're doing it tough, (by our western standards).Even for a cynical journalist, it was inspirational being around them and so rewarding when they learned new things.Other volunteers I knew had similar experiences.

For Tim Siv, a pharmacist from Adelaide, volunteering was personal; his family fled from the Khmer Rouge when he was just two years old.He went back to Siem Reap and worked in the medical clinic at the Globalteer project New Hope as a pharmacist and doctor.

"It was one of the most amazing and rewarding things I've ever done but it's also one of the most frustrating because we didn't have access to all the medicines they needed," he said."I came across so many kids with tuberculosis, HIV and hepatitis, but we could only treat what we could."Mr Siv was also involved in setting up chicken and fish farms to help the local community become more sustainable.

Youth driven

While there isn't much in the way of official figures on Australian voluntourists, Simone Faulkner at the Sydney University of Technology's is studying the social phenomenon for a PhD.She says while there's an incredible range of people volunteering while travelling, the biggest market is young people.

She says the British gap-year, or taking a year off after high school, has caught on in Australia."They're at that time of their life where they need a change and they want to explore I guess themselves and where they want to go, another big reason for doing it is to help others," she said.

During one of my most recent volunteering experiences at a wildlife park in Thailand, the majority of the volunteers were gap-year students.I was surprised by their level of dedication to the animals and their ability to tough it out in rough conditions without complaining. The work days started at 6:00 am and often involved shovelling some kind of poo.

We also spent a great deal of time scrubbing pools, planting trees and doing endless cycles of feeding and watering the animals in hot and ridiculously humid conditions.We were constantly under attack, from the red ants on the ground, the mosquitoes in the air and the monkeys above who thought it was hilarious to try and pee on us when we walked underneath their cages.

None of this probably sounds like much fun but it was one of the best experiences I've had. I learned a lot about animals, their behaviour and their conservation. The bond between the volunteers and the sense of community you get from living and working alongside people is also something that leaves a big impression on you.

More harm than good?

"It's always with the best intentions that the worst work is done," said Oscar Wilde.While my personal volunteering experiences have been incredibly positive, I have been left wondering about the downsides of voluntourism.For instance, while I have a Bachelor of English and have taught at university for over 10 years, many of the volunteers don't have any teaching qualifications at all. It seems as long as you have a half decent command of the English language, you're in.

The length of time volunteers generally spend in a community is also a concern. I witnessed many of the kids becoming attached to the volunteers, only to have them disappear the next week.A recent report by the Human Sciences Research Council on volunteering in Africa found that "unstable attachments and losses experienced by young children with changing caregivers leaves them very vulnerable, and puts them at greatly increased risk for psychosocial problems that could affect their long-term well-being".

The report also raises concerns about negative flow on effects, saying "...there is a real danger of voluntourists crowding out local workers, especially when people are prepared to pay for the privilege to volunteer".While the money paid is earmarked for needy projects, NGOs, despite their best intentions, still have overheads and a large part of the donations can be eaten up by administration costs.

A 2008 study by Tourism Research and Marketing, an independent British consultancy, provided the first global overview of the voluntourism market.It found voluntourism is booming, and estimates that there are 1.6 million volunteer tourists a year, with the industry worth up to $2.6 billion dollars world wide.The big dollars being thrown around has led to the establishment of commercial providers, rather than not for profit organisations becoming involved.

Turning worthwhile projects into money-making ventures also brings up all sorts of ethical problems.The HSRC report cited concerns that "...gap-year students risked 'becoming the new colonialists', with organisations increasingly catering to the needs of volunteers rather than the needs of the communities they claim to supportIn my personal experience at the wildlife centre in Thailand, whenever someone complained about the living conditions, they were told the money was spent on feeding and housing the animals, not the comfort of the volunteers.The centre also had a strict no touching policy and volunteers were reminded the creatures were wild animals, not pets.

Not all projects are so conscientious. At many centres, volunteers and visitors are allowed to touch, hand feed and even sit on the animals, which can hardly be for their benefit.This begs the question: are flawed projects better than not doing anything at all?Knowledge, education and understanding may be the key.

My most recent volunteering experiences are ones I've organised myself after I've arrived in a place. That way, it's possible to really check out the organisation and understand its purpose in the community. I also haven't had to pay for these experiences, which cuts out the scope for corruption.And at the end of the day, seeing the benefits of my work still makes me believe I'm doing more good than harm.

Source = abc.net.au