My junior year in high school, I had the opportunity to go to the Dominican Republic for my school’s annual service trip for juniors. I originally was going to stay local and do something at home, but when one of my friends said she was going, I decided to ask my parents and give it a shot. They said yes, and in March, we set off for our six-day excursion. My group was the second or third from my school to take the trip.
The purpose of the trip was to volunteer with a local community and help them. Well, honestly, I don’t really remember what we were originally told we’d be helping with. The day after we arrived, we went to the small community center where we were graciously welcomed by local families. Once the tour and the welcome was over, we were sent to play with kids.
We played with the kids for probably three or four hours that day, running around, giving piggyback rides, trying to learn their clapping games through the language barrier. We laughed in delight as they tried to get us to understand what they were saying. We only had one fluent Spanish speaker on the trip. We smiled as these “poor little kids” smiled at us and “delighted” in playing with our hair and taking our non-working cell phones for pictures and games.
After our lunch, during which we basically locked ourselves in a room so we wouldn’t be asked for food or have to share our clean water, we actually set out to do some “work.” Some people, myself included, were sent to work on the library they were setting up, arranging books into different categories and trying to sort them in some usable manner. There were thousands of books, all of them donated and covered in dust, like they’d been sitting in storage for years. Others painted a wall, a wall that each previous class had painted before. I think some people painted a room, some people did something with concrete, but as the day drew on, more and more people abandoned their tasks to sit outside or play with the kids.
Most days followed in that same format. We would wake up in our hosts’ house, have breakfast that they made for us, make our way over to the little community center again and spend the day doing little chores around the house, but mainly playing with the kids. On one of the days, we were shown around the surrounding community and invited into the homes of some of the people that lived there.
The houses were so small and none had running water. The grade school was across from a drug dealer’s house, and his Range Rover was parked in the front. We “oohed” and “ahhed” and the conditions they were living in them, pitying them and the little they had. We went back to our house and talked about how grateful we were for what we had in the U.S. and the passion we shared to “help” these people. Two days later, after a bout of food poisoning that spared very few of us, we headed back home, with promises to return to those smiling little children and help the people we saw.
Since our trip, our school has gone back twice, and will probably continue to go in the future. But looking back on that trip, I honestly feel very gross about it, for lack of a better word. That trip was voluntourism at its finest, something J.K. Rowling actually tweeted about recently.
We went to a place to “help” when really we were a group of (mostly) privileged white kids going into a place, playing with kids and pretending that the very fact that we were there would improve their lives. I really can’t tell you one thing I did that changed anyone’s life there. My talents would have been much better served at home, a place where my skill sets and abilities would be put to better use.
I could not relate to the children I met. I couldn’t even speak their language. And I still wonder how they feel about it, all these teenagers coming in, showering them with “love” for a few days and then leaving all of the sudden, without any explanation or any true promise to return. Or how they feel the next year, when another group comes in and the cycle is repeated. What can a 16 year-old do for a child in poverty? The problems we saw in our time there are so much bigger than all of us that went, and bigger than anything that can be solved in six days.
Not all mission trips are like this. Some do provide real aid to people who are really struggling. But so much more can be done to help the people of these communities get on their feet and provide them with the tools they need to improve their lives. The resources that are used in busing and flying kids over to these countries could probably simply be donated or given to the communities, and used to educate and cultivate the communities that are at the heart of the problems. This issue is so much bigger and more complex than what I understand and what I can say here, and I don’t want to simplify it in any way.
But what I do know is that my 16-year-old self did nothing to improve the lives of the people I met there, and I feel that I took advantage of them and used their poverty and their struggles to make myself feel better about my life, and I convinced myself for a while that I actually made a difference in that community. As I continue to grow and learn, I do hope to help those who haven’t had the same opportunities that I have, but I hope to do it in a way that not only benefits me and my ego, but benefits them and treats them with the respect and dignity they have and that they deserve.
