Upon returning to any left-leaning liberal arts college in the fall and asking the typical “What did you do over the summer?” question, one occasionally hears about community service trips to developing countries. These trips are frequently attacked, often accurately, as being self-serving resume builders. In his recent Argus opinion piece “Africa for Africans: Thoughts on Humanitarian Work,” Kennedy Odede described this phenomenon: wide-eyed, idealistic Americans taking a community service trip to a developing nation, and return¬ing home with something to put on their resume and a pretentious pseudo-knowledge of the hardships of life in a developing country.
While thinking about this phenomenon, I was reminded of a South Park episode making fun of people who drive hybrid cars. In the episode, South Park is in danger of being polluted by the smug attitudes of Prius owners. Stan, Cartman, and Kyle have to save South Park from being contaminated by a deathly smug cloud by destroying all of the town’s hybrid cars. However, they ultimately realize that driving hybrid cars is a good thing, beneficial to both con¬sumers and to the environment, as long as people aren’t obnoxiously smug about owning one.
This logic can apply to the types of community service trips that many Wesleyan students go on during their long breaks. However, while some peo¬ple act as if they can save developing na¬tions simply by gracing them with their presence, the value of privileged students going on community service trips to developing countries should not be un¬derestimated. Although they can lead to skyrocketing levels of smugness, these ex¬cursions positively affect the flannel-clad Wesleyan students that embark on them as well as the developing nations they are helping, albeit to a lesser extent.
I spent last semester’s spring break volunteering in Haiti with seven other Wesleyan students. We worked with an organization that set up schools and day¬care centers that doubled as treatment centers for PTSD, which many chil¬dren suffered from after the earthquake. We organized supplies, assisted medi¬cal teams that went out to the refugee camps, and entertained children with little to do in the aftermath of the earth¬quake (white people are something of a novelty in Haiti, and children regularly mobbed us to feel our hair and poke our skin to watch it turn pink).
Our two weeks of volunteer work may not have dramatically changed Haiti, but Haiti certainly changed us. A two-week trip certainly does not make me an expert on Haiti, but I learned a lot about a country that is known to many Westerners as nothing more than an impoverished disaster zone. We learned that Haitians put great pride and effort into their appearance. For example, we were teased by young children for how dirty our hands were on more than one occasion. We also learned that many Haitians were infuriated when Western camera crews filmed them living in tent cities after the earthquake, as they were embarrassed by their new economic situ¬ation and felt they were being exploited as sensationalist entertainment.
The most vital lesson I took back from Haiti may seem like an obvious one: that people living in a developing nation are not so different from people who live in the U.S. I found that, de¬spite Haiti’s impoverishment, life goes on. Their lives are complicated by hard¬ships that few in the U.S. ever have to face, but the Haitian teenagers I met were just as interested in texting their friends and flirting with love interests as any American teenager. Haitians are not spending all day mourning their coun¬try’s situation, but instead attempting to go about their daily routines and find new jobs.
We did not save Haiti by gracing it with our presence, but we were able to do something of value, even if it was on a tiny scale. The money we gave to volun¬teer in Haiti was used by our organiza¬tion to pay its full time employees, and virtually all of them are Haitian. We were also able to see for ourselves the hypoc¬risy that often comes with humanitarian aid, a valuable lesson for any privileged teenager thinking about going on a com-munity service trip to a developing na¬tion.
In one story we heard, supplies were being delivered to refugees through Haitian community organizers until UN convoys arrived. At that point, the con¬voys decided to take the supplies and de¬liver them directly to the crowds, result¬ing in a riot. In response, the UN took all of the remaining supplies and left. More direct encounters with hypocrisy-ridden humanitarianism included the tattered tents we saw in the refugee camps em¬broidered with the words “a gift from the American people”—as if the U.S. were a great god bestowing Haiti with its generosity, despite over 200 years of economic exploitation and a continuing strangle hold on the Haitian government through the deliverance of aid money.
We also saw the types of people who go to Haiti to pad their resumes. One doctor we worked with treated her Haitian coworkers and patients like in-ept children. She showed more interest in perfecting her make-up for the pho¬to-op next to a sick Haitian baby than actually treating the baby she was hold¬ing. After witnessing the condescension that often accompanies Western aid to the developing world, we were inspired to change our country’s attitudes about developing nations and our approach to developing aid programs. I do not pretend to be more knowledgeable than Haitians themselves about the rebuild¬ing of their country’s infrastructure; however, as American college students, we have closer access to powerful chan¬nels that could provide crucial assistance just as media attention concerning Haiti is beginning to fade.
So did we change the world? No. But we were able to do something positive for Haiti, and Haiti was able to change us. I gained a passion to get in¬volved with humanitarian work, and was exposed to a brief yet powerful portrait of life in a developing country. If you have the chance to take a community service trip to a developing country, I highly recommend it. When you respect the locals as your equals and avoid smug-faced pretension about your newly-discovered worldliness, these kinds of trips can help others and change you for the better.
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