Originally Posted by
eponymous_coward
I'm skeptical that it's a great idea to import wealthy tourists to do manual labor that requires some skill and training (especially if they are likely to be bad at it, as the links detail).
At the risk of going further OT, I agree completely. I've seen well-meaning but naive "volunteers" cause havoc and ruin communities with their activities.
True story. There was an orphanage down the street from where I used to live in Ghana. They used to have a full-time staff member whose role was to manage incoming donations of clothes, etc... She would sort, clean, mend, assign and follow-up with thank you notes. Then along came a church group from the USA who decided to "adopt" the orphanage. They showered it with gifts, volunteers, etc.. Wonderful? No. With all these extra bodies on hand, the orphanage management decided that they could do without the staff member managing the donations and let a volunteer handle that instead. So they laid off the local lady and replaced her with a teenaged American volunteer. The lady eventually had to resort to prostitution to make ends meet. Did this really help the local community? I'm not entirely convinced.
Additionally, the security needs for the volunteers often wind up alienating the local population. The volunteers have "security liaisons" (basically ex-military types who couldn't get hired on with reputable PSD firms) whose role is to ensure that they interact as little as possible with "unapproved" locals under the guise of security. When they go to the supermarket, the security folks push local people out of line so that the volunteers do not have to wait in line ("due to security concerns"). This is more of an issue with Americans than Europeans to be fair - European volunteers tend to be as oblivious about security risks as Americans are paranoid.
I'm not against these groups that usually do intend to help, but I do sometimes question what real benefits they do bring.