Volunteering In The Developing World

The post, How to evaluate volunteer opportunities in Haiti, is one of the posts that disturbs me at a very deep level and I was about to comment why. Fortunately, Long Bench took the time andnailed it with this excellent comment - part of which I'll quote below:

...International NGO's have been a huge, huge part of the reason that Port-au-Prince/Haiti is in such a bad situation right now. As such, Haitians are no strangers to over-paid college grads & "volunteers" running around the place, doing all kinds of things, some useful, some not. The same NGOs have also been hiring local Haitian workers, albeit in limited capacities, and mostly to serve the imported staff's needs as drivers, translators, cooks, glorified personal secretaries/assistants, go-betweens and labourers. The problem is not the flooding of the place with "volunteers" over and against using local labour. Volunteers also help to "feed" the local economy by buying things at sometimes inflated prices, paying for their lodging, meals, transportation, etc. So, your stressing the importance of supporting the "local economy" here tells me that you don't actually know what the local economy looks like in Haiti in the first place. This also sounds like a softer version of the neo-liberal argument about "the need to put Haitians to work", and no attention to what they are to be paid.

The fundamental problem with many of these NGO's is the relationship of that organisation to Haitian society, and how it helps to shape volunteers' attitudes, outlooks and interactions with Haitians...

Let me add to this. I've spent a fair amount of my life in the past 10 years volunteering - technologically or otherwise - for various causes. Almost none of them made the news, were blog-buzz or media-buzz. Setting up a computer network in a Georgetown, Guyana hospital was a small thing to do as an example. What IBM had quoted at $50,000 US to do a pizza and an unleashed IT staff got done in a day. It wasn't even good pizza. But despite my best intentions in 2005, the computer network wasn't used because of a threatened IT manager. True, she was on vacation when we did it. She simply didn't see the value in it other than the fact that she could no longer be comfortable where she was - Retired In Place.

That's one lesson I learned.

Another I learned involved a solar powered computer setup for Amerindians to use - completely well intentioned, but almost only used by the same people who set it up. Hint: Amerindians don't need to upload their pictures to Flickr, they don't see the need for blogs and they know the people they want to know without Facebook or Twitter.

I pointedly included myself in this. My own opinion comes from a lot of experience volunteering not for high profile things but for lesser known things - the things that don't capture the news, the things where a little can go a long way. If I help sponsor a local football team so that they have uniforms and other things, that's my business - it isn't blogworthy. It's something that can get done.

And the recent developments with Hait, post-earthquake, are along the same lines. I championed and continue to champion the use of SMS for these sorts of things; I champion the use of Sahana's open source disaster software system (I watched with awe when it was first developed in 2005. Amazing work, that). And I saw things that inspire - but I saw most things fall completely flat when it came to official NGOs and so forth. Why? Because it isn't about volunteering - it's about people. All too often, swept up in their own search for (or) sense of worth, people volunteer. How do I know that? I'm guilty, too.

Volunteerism has to be tempered by what needs to be done. NGOs often exist because pre-existing NGOs didn't do what someone else thought was right. A plethora of competing, and sometimes adversarial, NGOs, government agencies and even foreign aid create a mine-field to negotiate for the very same people who need to be helped.

I'm not saying, "Don't volunteer". I would never say that. What I am saying is that you have to understand the context of what you are volunteering for - and adapt to the real context as it presents itself since initially, the real context is almost never apparent.

When it came to getting into Haiti and finding survivors, volunteering was much simpler: Life trumps everything. But when we speak of rebuilding, it gets ugly. NGOs need credit to get funding (it's a corporate culture despite not being for profit). The individual volunteer can easily be swept away in a tsunami of good intentions filled with the jetsam of NGO culture and counter-culture.

Volunteer - kudos to you if you do - but adapt to the reality. And remember the most important thing:

First, do no harm.

To affect something, you have to figure out what it is first.