It is hard to be the odd one out. It is even harder to be the odd one out in a place where you already stand out.
On a campus saturated by immersive service engagement opportunities, I’m surprised that acknowledgement of the ethical challenges independent students face have not resulted in a sustained, concrete outlet for support and discussion.
Last year, DukeEngage sent 350 students into hands-on service projects. Over four years time, this means about 23 percent of Duke undergraduates will have participated in a civic engagement program through DukeEngage alone. Since more than 40 percent of students also participate in some form of study abroad, and numerous campus departments, programs and institutes offer funding for individual service or research-oriented projects, it may be conservative to argue that at least half of Duke undergraduates will have had exposure to an immersive experience upon graduation.
These opportunities are wildly popular because many of us want intense first-hand engagement with cultures, customs and lifestyles different from our own. Full engagement also implies, however, that volunteers must submit themselves to all aspects of the new community, including social, religious, cultural—and ethical—habits to fully engage with their surroundings. Serving alone in a new environment is particularly difficult because the volunteer does not have a classmate or professor to rely on for guidance.
Although many discussions about ethics are riddled with subjective nuances, some are incontestable. When the difference between right and wrong is more black and white than grey, confronting the situation by oneself becomes much more complicated—and realistic.
In my independent service experiences, I encountered similar problems. I wondered whether it was best to adapt to my hosts or to bring my Western notions of right and wrong to the field. I questioned whether adopting cultural relativism was necessary to reach my project’s short-term goals. As time went on, confronting and coming to terms with the knowledge that my co-workers were habitually sleeping with school-age girls for money, that my manager was offering free services to friends at the expense of the organization and that my housemate was stealing water from the neighbor next door became increasingly disorienting without a familiar support system nearby.
When people in new environments witness or experience situations they disagree with, many choose to do nothing. Reasons for this inertia are fairly obvious: Building trust and acceptance with the local community is a top priority when volunteers are living, learning and in many ways, depending on their hosts. The volunteers become painfully sensitive to political, socioeconomic, safety and power considerations as an outsider. Maintaining good terms with the host can also be critical to achieving short-term project goals. Consequently, many volunteers naturally adapt or suspend their ethical frameworks to harmonize with what they perceive to be their host’s moral system.
Pre-departure dialogues and workshops are a good start to the discussion, but they do not serve adequately when the individual is fully immersed and isolated in ethical dilemmas. This is because for many people, ethics-related deliberation is relevant only when they are forced to choose between inaction and an active response. Driven by necessity, students move beyond visualization to recognition of the gap between “I would do” and “I will do” when they are in the field.
For these reasons, immersive service experiences are valuable to non-participants because they provide a broader range of moral questions than what we tend to encounter in an academic institution.
Confronting these dilemmas can be disillusioning and frustrating for the volunteer who is experiencing it alone. We should support our student volunteers by developing accessible online forums or hotlines that provide structure and guidance during the engagement. These resources can respond to volunteers’ ethical impulses as they experience them as well as empower volunteers when they feel morally compelled to act.
Building this type of informal ethics-related infrastructure can provide tangible long-term benefits for all students. Addressing moral issues from the field as they surface give volunteers a sense of competency and ownership. That faith and self-confidence to act in disorienting environments is a critical leadership skill that they can choose to cultivate from their service experience.
Non-participants will also benefit from seeing how other students are confronting ethics-related situations to better prepare themselves for similar opportunities, or at the least, to live vicariously through them. We should continue to look for ways to maximize the impact University service programs have on all students, and support our independent volunteers during and after their engagements.
Courtney Han is a Trinity senior. Her column runs every other Friday.
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