Jeff Blumenfeld - Travel With Purpose: A Field Guide to Voluntourism

Travel with Purpose

Travel with Purpose

A Field Guide to Voluntourism

Jeff Blumenfeld

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham Boulder New York London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield

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Copyright 2019 by Jeff Blumenfeld

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

978-1-5381-1532-9 (cloth)

978-1-5381-1533-6 (electronic)

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Printed in the United States of America

To my young grandson,

Wyatt Fowler Couperthwait.

The future is in your hands.

Contents

Acknowledgments

I t is with gratitude that I acknowledge the assistance provided to me in preparation of this guide to voluntourism. Certainly, I am appreciative and in awe of the numerous voluntourists who took the time to share their most memorable experiences, provide advice to prospective voluntourists, and offer a glimpse at their future plans.

Each interview I conducted, either by telephone or in person, provided insight into what drives these people, what gets them up in the morning, particularly the benefits they gain personally while doing good for others.

Id also like to thank those selfless folks from the nonprofit community who took me under their wing and allowed me to participate in their own lifes work. A shout-out in particular to George Chief Cook Basch of Taos, New Mexico, founder of the Himalayan Stove Project, who felt there was a better way to clear the air in Nepal, one fuel-efficient cookstove at a time. George opened my eyes to the unique challenges of fundraising.

Scott Hamilton of Stamford, Connecticut, president of Dooley Intermed International, asked me to serve as director of communications on two separate eye care missions to Nepal. He also taught me how a well-run expedition can achieve its mission safely and responsibly. I also learned from him important life lessons, not the least of which was avoiding salads or tuna fish sandwiches served by sketchy Nepalese street food vendors.

Then theres my literary agent, Terry Whalin of Highland Ranch, Colorado, who, when we first met ten years ago, told me how to write a book proposal, based upon his own book, Book Proposals That Sell (2005). He has shepherded me through the process of writing my first book, Get Sponsored , followed by this one. Ive long valued his sage advice.

Finally, there are two mentors from my Wonder Bread years who have my undying gratitude for instilling in me a love of storytelling. First is Madeline Conway, who edited Monti Matters , my weekly high school column in the local Monticello, New York, Evening News. I still have the strip of hot type used to headline the column, back when it was set by linotype machine. Conway was first to show me how molten lead was transferred into my words using this now-outdated hot metal typesetting system. What magic it was to watch.

And Mike Greenstein of the Syracuse New Times , who let me write about a variety of quirky topics while attending Syracuse University, including a bizarre visit to a local casket factory. Both Conway and Greenstein apparently saw promise in a budding young cub reporter willing to accept a salary of ten cents per column inch. Back then the pay was so low, I might as well have been volunteering. But it was a great start to a career.

Introduction

A World of Voluntourism Opportunities

I magine yourself in a schoolroom in Nepal, one of the most remote areas of one of the most hard-to-reach countries on earth. The Lower Mustang region to be exact.

Traveling there requires a fourteen-hour flight from New York to Doha, Qatar. Then four-and-a-half hours by air to Kathmandu, one of the worlds worst airports. From Kat its a 127-mile flight to Pokhara, followed by a jarring, eight-hour Jeep ride over a vertiginous dirt roadone side is a mountain wall, the other side a two-hundred-foot vertical cliff.

Finally you arrive, but its not just any schoolroom. It has been disinfected with formalin, an aqueous solution of formaldehyde (mean stuff but highly effective), and converted into an operating room so that doctors from New York Eye & Ear Infirmary can provide the gift of sight to twenty-four blind Nepalis. Prior to this, they lived in a world of darkness for no other reason than they had cataracts, the clouding of the eyes lens, easily corrected.

I know. I was there to tell the story of Dooley Intermeds Gift of Sight Expedition. That right there was my aha moment. I was in a foreign land as a tourist, but also as a volunteer.

A voluntourist, if you willa mix of both travel and volunteering. The term is credited to travel writer Alison Gardner who wrote a feature article in 1994 about volunteer vacations for older travelers. She cites some of the earliest players in the fledgling field, including Earthwatch and Habitat for Humanity, both of which remain steadfast short-term voluntourism models to this day.

Today, Gardner is publisher and editor of the Travel with a Challenge web magazine, read by 1.742 million senior travelers worldwide. Recently she tells me it was quite an honor in 2012 when she received a call from the publishers of the Oxford Dictionary in the UK, saying they were trying to trace the origin of the word, voluntourism, before they accepted it.

They asked if I could send them a copy of the article in which I had first used the term in 1994. All done, and now it is an official entry in the Oxford Dictionary which is about as authoritative as it gets, I suppose.

Indeed. There it is, a form of tourism in which travellers participate in voluntary work, typically for a charity.

Over the past thirty years, voluntourism has grown with such momentum that both nonprofit organizations and for-profit advisory services and tour operators are scrambling to match many different agendas.

With a firmly-entrenched Western world mindset of rest and relaxation = vacation, who would have dreamed that working while on vacation would become such a fast-growing segment of the travel industry today? asks Gardner.

I am a lousy vacationer, bored silly sitting on a beach or touring umpteen churches on cruise ship excursions. Being a regular tourist is not enough for me. I want a meaningful role when I travel and perhaps you do as well.

Average plain vanilla tourists returning from a do-nothing beach vacation like to tell family and friends where they traveled. Nothing wrong with playing Robinson Crusoe, sprawled on a lounge chair, umbrella drink in hand, salty breeze ruffling their hair as they post palm tree images to Instagram.

Voluntourists, on the other hand, not only describe where theyve been but explain how the world became a better place as a result of their time and dedication on the road.

While lying on a beach marinated in Johnsons Baby Oil and iodine has its merits, Im guessing youll find voluntourism more meaningful, more memorable, and perhaps transformatively life-altering. Whats more, many voluntourism opportunities youll read about in the following pages allow visitors to devote only a portion of their trips to service, leaving time aside for sightseeing, dining out, or yes, even vegging out on a tropical beach with that fancy drink.