More and more tourist agencies offer trips to southern countries with activities linked to the local community, a fake volunteering promoted by influencers known as “voluntourism”.
“This has nothing to do with responsible international volunteering. Volunteering is an educational activity“explains Montse Santolino, spokesperson for the Catalan Federation of NGOs.
The real ones are linked to activities that benefit the local population and are always organized by NGOs, in addition to prior preparation: “The organizations never do it in July or August, they prepare these trips several months in advance, they do a lot of training and then they propose to continue with some form of involvement in the organization.”
Therefore, if you are considering doing real volunteering, you need to ask yourself where you are going, with whom and for what in order to avoid the impact that these trips disguised as volunteering leave on the population.
“Colonialist, paternalistic behaviors or attitudes, significant emotional prejudices. These children see how white, western and rich people live their lives with inappropriate behaviors.“We make suggestions to them based on our accidental mentality, on the emotional attachment of creatures that pass through groups of people who take a lot of pictures of them and disappear,” Santolino explains.
Thus perverting humanitarian aid and promoting the trafficking of minors, as in Nepal, where 85% of children in orphanages have a father and a mother.
