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Summer is coming: volunteering in Africa?

2022-05-16T03:37:53.969Z


The commonly extended as 'voluntourism' is born from the privilege of some to satisfy their personal experiences based on the needs of others. It is a growing industry that thrives on unskilled youth


Planes arrive to an entire continent from which its residents barely leave.

Often loaded with adventure backpacks, cameras, pills against all evil and prejudices that, transformed into firm sentences, have their own seat on the return ticket.

The countries of sub-Saharan Africa, converted into looting camps, into permanent stereotypes and future opportunities for those who can decide on it, are now the focus of the so-called volunteer and humanitarian tourism.

49 countries that in the collective imagination make up only one, but that beat at their own rhythm with their innumerable languages, cultural expressions, peoples, natures, conditions and pretensions;

They mutate at amazing speed.

Only ignorance leads us to think that Africa is one and that in any of its corners, whites are necessary.

This is one of the vestiges of colonialism: the ethnocentric discourse that assumes that the North will save the South, that imposes its methods and that contemplates a single form of development.

The commonly extended as

voluntourism

is born from the privilege of some to satisfy their personal experiences based on the needs of others.

It is a growing industry that thrives on unskilled youth who fail to appreciate the negative impact of their good intentions.

Sometimes this undemanded aid perpetuates and aggravates the problems it is intended to combat.

The voices that denounce the growth of orphanages in impoverished countries that function as fronts for Western companies are resounding.

Businesses that even offer money in exchange for minors who occupy their walls and become Instagram posts for their volunteers or, to be correct, customers.

The number of empty projects that invade this continent is alarming, turning poverty into an attraction and not creating any type of awareness or real commitment – ​​much less lasting – with the causes.

Expensive, express trips to the global south have become a kind of applauded vocation that professionalized people who do meaningful work in the field always run away from.

Somehow, expensive and express trips to the global south have become a kind of applauded vocation that professionalized people who do meaningful work in the field always run away from.

Perhaps the first requirement before becoming part of this fashion is to question the motives and intentions that push us into it.

Distinguish if our contribution can be particularly substantial, because if the answer is no, then it will be the opposite.

Previous training on racism, Pan-Africanist issues, listening to their voices and attending to their cultural expressions to deconstruct ourselves and change our perspective.

Safeguard human and children's rights, promote dignity.

To realize, ultimately, that the world is not a stage on which to project ourselves.

“Independence is nothing more than the prelude to a new and more committed struggle for the right to direct our own economic and social affairs;

to build our society according to our aspirations, without the obstacle of overwhelming and humiliating neo-colonialist control and interference”, proclaimed the first president of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, at the first Organization for African Union in 1963. If that president, whom Every Ghanaian citizen still remembered as the best, looking at the current landscape, would condemn this new type of interference, equally crushing and humiliating.

Building our social identity on stories of saviors and saved perpetuates everything we need to change and distances us from what is most important to our culture today: diversity and understanding.

Cristina Segovia

works at the development NGO Association for the Social Development of Peoples (ADEPU).

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-05-16

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