Title: How to Live Your Dream of Volunteering Overseas
Author: Joseph L. Collins (and Zahara Heckscher and Stefano DeZerega)
Co-author's web site: http://zaharaheckscher.com/
Date: 2002
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0-14-20-0071-X
Length: 500 pages
Quote: “The consensus among volunteers is that they receive much more than they contribute.”
(Review reclaimed from Blogjob, where the ISBN numbers link to Amazon Smile accounts. If you buy the book after clicking on the picture, in theory I get a commission; if you buy it after clicking on the number, in theory Grandma Bonnie Peters' favorite charity, ADRA, gets one.)
About half of How to Live Your Dream of Volunteering Overseas is general advice for volunteers. The tone is generally encouraging. Some people probably shouldn’t volunteer overseas, but the book contains some deep and detailed discussion of whether these people shouldn’t go overseas at all, or should choose the organization and mission very carefully. Seniors with work experience may be more appreciated than “junior” volunteers. There are limited volunteer opportunities for extremely young people, people with physical disabilities, people who want to have any kind of sex life while volunteering, etc. Sometimes, after considering the opportunities for work overseas, people decide they can be more useful doing volunteer work closer to home.
One thing I like about this book is the careful attention given to the pitfalls of paternalism. In the 1990s, when Washington, D.C., had a gun ban and was logging approximately a murder a day, Heckscher asked readers to imagine a lot of helpful foreigners coming in to help Washington. She pictured a group from Jamaica recommending more marijuana smoking, a group from Zambia requiring that the city's (many) youth spend time every day waiting on the city's (few) elders, etc. This is not unlike some of the efforts North Americans have made to "help" people in other countries.
It's hard for twentieth-century left-wingers to eliminate vestiges of “helpism” from their thinking. Although Americans have the historical example of ancestors who successfully built a nation for themselves after violently rejecting the “help” of a relatively liberal dictatorship, in the twentieth century many of us listened to Europeans who were still making the fundamental assumptions that (1) most people are unfit to manage even a store or a farm of their own, yet (2) a few people are somehow fit to make decisions for others as well as themselves, and the only question is where to find the competent minority by whom we should be ruled. It is possible for people of genuine good will, who have let themselves be taught to curb their own tendencies toward “helpism” on a personal level, to go on believing that bigger government can meet people’s needs better than people can meet their own needs. I say it is possible, if these people don’t question the Socialist beliefs they were taught—if they hold those beliefs sacred and practice them as a kind of substitute for religion.
A correspondent from Zambia, cited in the book, was faithfully reporting what the Socialist government his country had back then was doing for his people, and it was horrible. Everything written about Zambia at this period was horrible. After a flood we collected supplies for the flooded-out school: pens and pencils, crayons, pads, binders, notebooks, paper, paperback books. A postal worker warned, “We can guarantee that they’ll get as far as Lusaka, but they may not reach your friends. Lusaka is full of thieves.” In the U.S. the word “thieves” suggests “people who are looking for money, who would not be interested in pencils and paper,” so I mailed the boxes anyway. Remembering how American children react to a “gift” of mere school supplies when they’re missing favorite toys, we had thrown in a few small toys, and lined the taped sides of each box with a T-shirt. The next letter reported that some of the books and toys, and the shirts, had arrived. Apparently the thieves in Lusaka really were interested in pencils, paper, crayons, binders, and child-sized backpacks. The people who were receiving the full “benefits” of “modernization” under their Socialist government were worse off than the farmers who still had to practice their hunting and gathering skills every time the river flooded.
Of course, trucking large boxes of cash or jewelry around any U.S. city would be a gamble too, but even when American Democracy has degenerated into mere capitalism I don’t think our thieves have ever been desperate enough to risk jail time for used pencils. And of course some countries are richer than others, but the historical fact has been that all countries that have adopted socialism have lost money on the deal. Even in the United States, when we’ve tried limited socialist schemes like Social Security pensions and compulsory tax-funded schools, those schemes have lost money and failed to serve people well. When people feel that they’re being ordered or forced to do anything, they . I think the lesson to be learned from history is that rich countries may be able to afford some sort of socialized safety net as long as people don’t completely depend on it, but any socialist effort to do more than prevent starvation is doomed not to work.
But How to Live Your Dream of Volunteering Overseas still reflects a socialist-influenced perspective. I don’t think that ruins the book at all. The writers tried to be fair and factual. On the whole I think they were. They report good things about several Protestant organizations and a frankly capitalist organization too. (One doesn’t think of capitalists organizing overseas missions to teach people about successful capitalist business management, but it’s happened.) If the book shows a little more personal warmth toward left-wingers than toward other people, well...anyone old enough to volunteer overseas should already have noticed that different people warm up to different things.
Of course some of the organizations listed in the book have changed names, addresses, plans, and some have ceased to exist, by now. After reading the general information, including tips on fundraising—it costs money to send volunteers overseas, and organizations other than the tax-funded Peace Corps often require the volunteers to provide that money—and questions to ask and things to pack and reminders about common courtesy and some thoughts on the benefits of celibacy overseas, readers then come to a discussion of organizations as they were in the year 2000. The purpose of this section is to give you some idea of the range of possibilities, and some keywords to look for when you research what’s being done now on the Internet. Searching for “volunteer overseas” would be far too broad. The book will suggest more useful possibilities, like “volunteer pediatric nurse Ukraine ” or “volunteer teach English Bangladesh.”
Also worth noting is the way some organizations place volunteers both inside and outside the organization’s home country. Of course, although projects whose goals are primarily evangelical or religious aren’t listed in this book, churches have been sponsoring such “missionary projects” both at home and abroad for a long time. (Church-sponsored humanitarian projects, like those of the Mennonite Central Committee or like the dozens of programs organized by Catholics and Quakers, are listed.) Some nonprofit organizations whose primary goals are disaster relief, education, conservation, housing, medical care, or business development are active in North America too.
There’s even a chapter on “going alone.” If you want to help people but don’t fit into an organization’s plan, or haven’t found the right organization before your opportunity to travel came along, you can simply go to the place you want to see with an intention of finding opportunities for casual volunteer work once you get there. People who do this don’t always think out their intention before planning the rest of their trip. Sometimes they just go to a place, have some “down time” while they’re there, see a notice in a newspaper or even see a work project being done, and volunteer the time they have.
Still, my mental associations to words like “volunteer” and “donation” are mixed. Disasters happen. A house or hayfield catches fire, and everybody rushes out to help fight the fire, partly because humans have an instinct to fight uncontrolled fires and partly because an uncontrolled fire just might spread to our property too. If the house becomes unlivable, everybody donates what they can spare to help the neighbors get through their hard times, partly because humans have an instinct to help others with obvious needs and partly because, if the flooded-out family receive more than they absolutely have to have, we might be the ones in need and they might give our donations back to us next year. Ayn Rand may have had some trouble understanding this kind of help, that “blesses him that gives as him that takes,” but people who’ve not been traumatized by the Russian Revolution usually understand it pretty well.
Unfortunately, organized “volunteers” can compete with job seekers. "Donations" can replace a fair exchange, depress the local economy and morale, and isolate people whose sociocultural pattern brings people together primarily when they are doing something useful.
Perhaps one useful tip may be found in Wendell Berry’s writing about “community” self-government. You can and should help set the goals and policy for what’s done in your neighborhood, among people who live within a day’s walk from your home. You can and should travel in order to learn from other communities. While travelling, you are a visitor. You can help the people whose guest you are by doing what they tell you, when they tell you, as they tell you to do it. As a person who “came in to sojourn” you must not attempt to be “a prince and a judge over” your hosts. Assume that the topics about which you’re better informed than any three-year-old in the host community consist of your individual body, your specific job training and education, and your personal experience; you can “give” your hosts a share of the benefits of those things if and when they ask for it. If you want to make decisions, go home.
Zahara Heckscher really did form lasting relationships in the communities where she volunteered. Even though the organization with which she worked in Africa turned out to be one of the least respectable in the book, and the project on which she worked turned out to be a failure, and she also damaged her health, she and her friends agreed that her time in Africa was a good thing for all concerned.
You don’t meet people like Zahara Heckscher every day, or necessarily in every lifetime. You don’t meet families like her hosts every day, either. And it occurs to me that if the authors of How to Live Your Dream of Volunteering Overseas ever write another book, it should be a book about how residents of host communities rated the volunteer efforts there.
Compared with what we all envisioned before the research was done, How to Live Your Dream of Volunteering Overseas is on the bland and, well, liberal side. Some people who liked the concept of comparing different organizations imagined a sort of report-card format that would make it clear which organizations had the highest “overhead expenses”; which ones had planned the least successful projects; which ones were so politically oriented that Joe McCarthy would have called them Communist Front Groups; which ones “surprised” volunteers with living conditions very different from what they’d advertised or trained volunteers to cope with; which ones would take a young woman who hadn’t raised the full cost of her volunteer experience in time, and set her on a street corner in a country where she didn’t speak the language, with orders to raise the rest of the money by any means necessary...(Yes, one organization routinely forced American youth to beg on street corners in Europe. That story is told in the book.)
However, the report-card format didn’t work well in practice. All the organizations discussed in detail could be said to have accomplished some good. Most of the ones not discussed in detail were also said to have accomplished some good, but the writers and researchers didn’t have time to confirm this personally. “Overhead expenses” tend to reflect the level of “gift giving” and unofficial taxation that exists in many poor countries, more than the organizers’ personal greed, although not all of the organizers were living in monastic simplicity; “overhead” varies more between host countries than between charitable organizations.
The Peace Corps itself gets a semi-negative review, based on the assumption that readers already know about the Peace Corps and either didn’t get into it or don’t want to work with it. A European organization best known in the U.S. as Humana gets a negative review, based on the intensity of former volunteers’ feelings about the inefficency of the organization and the greed of the organizers. Otherwise, the length of reviews mostly reflects the amount of information former volunteers supplied, and the purpose of each review is more to identify which readers would feel most attracted to the kind of work the organization does, rather than evaluate how well they do it. The research team found no organization altogether bad...or good.
You, the reader, will definitely find some organizations for which you don’t want to work...whether it’s because you disagree with an organization’s agenda too fervently even to support their practical humanitarian work, or because you’re not up to the kind of thing their volunteers do. Flying Doctors really do provide medical care at clinics that have to be reached by helicopter. If you don’t have medical and aviation skills, this is not the organization for you. Some organizations actively recruit volunteers to expose themselves to threatened violence, as human shields; they look for, and try to build on, personalities that are naturally calm, gentle, and non-threatening enough to defuse violence, but volunteers have to understand that they may be shot or blown up.
At the other end of the spectrum are organizations that let volunteers do a little routine work to cover the cost of a tour—organizations have advertised that they place volunteers in gender-balanced groups that are within ten years of the same age! Elderhostel “volunteers” are another group who work just enough to cover part of the cost of what may be very short, safe educational tours, taken with or without a grandchild. If you are physically fit to travel and financially able to chip in a little more than you cost your hosts and sponsors, there’s probably a volunteer opportunity for you.
Are there really bad organizations nobody should ever support? Those do crop up now and then, but they don’t last long. Organizers like Humana’s Mogens Amdi Petersen may be scam artists, but they have enough sense to direct some of the money they solicit into some genuine humanitarian work; some Humana projects have been outrageously poorly planned, but some have succeeded. “Least Competent Criminal” types, like a so-called minister who actually called himself Peter Beter (much fundraising on behalf of famine victims, no funds ever received in famine area), tend to be unmasked in a year or two. If an organization is listed in this book and is still operating, it’s probably legitimate, although not necessarily in the way you might prefer.
If contact information is listed but there’s no detailed discussion of what the organization was doing, that could mean that the organization recruits volunteers exclusively from and dedicates its work specifically to its religious or political sponsor group, or that the team didn’t have time to obtain much information about the organization.
All schools, libraries, and churches should own this book. All would-be volunteers should own this book, although if you want to buy a secondhand copy in order to save more money for your mission, the authors will understand. People who enjoy reading, and prefer nonfiction, should also buy this book; it contains good true stories, and if you knew the writers you’d want to buy the book out of respect. People who’ve been asked to support an international organization, and want to know more about the organization’s work, will also find this book helpful; most of the charities authorized to call your home and ask you for money do not send volunteers overseas and aren’t in the book, but you might want to look up the ones that are when deciding how much money to donate. In short, How to Live Your Dream of Volunteering Overseas is still a book for almost everybody.
It's a Fair Trade Book: $5 per book + $5 per package + $1 per online payment.
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