When my mom said, “don’t forget us,” as I left at the end of the summer, I felt a sudden moment of terror as I realized that I may never see her again.
I was leaving Guatemala, and my “mom” was actually my host-mom, whom I had lived with for nearly a month during my DukeEngage experience. At the time, I brushed aside the weight of this warning, assuring her that I would call constantly and that I could never forget my Guatemalan family.
Almost six months later, though, I’m starting to understand what she meant. I haven’t forgotten my family, or the fulfilling moments I spent with them in the country, but a lack of Internet connection and poor cellphone reception has made it harder and harder to keep in touch with them.
What’s worse, I hadn’t even thought of contacting them by phone until a friend who went on the trip with me told me that she was able to get in touch with her family. When I asked some of my fellow DukeEngagers if they had kept in touch with their families or community organizations, most of them admitted that they had just been too busy and hadn’t gotten the chance.
It disconcerted me to learn about our meager efforts to communicate with our host families and organizations that we worked with this past summer. It made me wonder whether the experience we had was truly “life-changing,” as some have described it, or if it was merely an exotic summer vacation.
And then an article I read recently on the NPR website suggested that it could, in fact, be both. The article discusses the new trend of “voluntourism,” wherein a traditional travel trip includes volunteer work for a charitable organization—your basic kill-two-birds-with-one-stone kind of endeavor. The article points out that as great as such an experience might be for the volunteer, it can often have a negative impact on the organization or people, particularly young children, that a volunteer interacts with during their experience. This is particularly the case in orphanages, where children become attached to a volunteer, but later feel a sense of abandonment (already heightened by their present state) when the volunteer leaves.
The article made me question the extent to which DukeEngage was essentially a “voluntour” experience for us. Can any of us imagine the impact our departure might have, not only on host families but also on the children (and maybe even adults) that we spent so much time with?
This is not to say that the act of voluntourism is completely devoid of merit. Many of the organizations very much need the help that is offered by international volunteers and these volunteers, in turn, can be so strongly impacted by their experience that they may return or continue to aid the organization in other ways.
That being said, how many of us have kept in contact with an international organization or family that we have spent time with during our DukeEngage experience, or any international volunteer experience for that matter? My host organization’s director told me that students from other schools often return after college to work for the organization, but that they had yet to have any Duke students do this.
For most of us, our future plans don’t involve dedicating our lives to international or domestic development work—I know mine probably won’t. But we shouldn’t let ourselves fall into the category of tourists who spend two months thinking that they have helped an organization and then never look back. Not all of us fall into this category—one of my DukeEngage friends continues to do online work for the organization; another friend is helping to sell merchandise made by a group of women who weave.
So, I’ve made a resolution to keep in touch with the organization I worked with and the host family I stayed with last summer—a summer I can only describe as the best and most eye-opening time of my life.
Last summer I was engaged. Engaged in a beautiful culture, in fulfilling work and with the heartwarming people of Guatemala—and I refuse to forget it.
Maybe I’m not yet ready to be married to the idea of being a volunteer for the rest of my life, but there are little things I can do to keep connected and continue what we started. I may fear marriage, but that’s no reason to walk away from commitment.
Sony Rao is a Trinity junior. Her column runs every other Tuesday. Follow Sony on Twitter @sony_rao
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