The rainforest clearing is scattered with a scruff of tumbledown barns and mud
huts. Piles of broken bricks and mounds of sand surround a half-finished
breeze-block building, its upper storey only a skeleton. There is also a
tatty volleyball net, a climbing frame made from moped tyres, and a big roll
of wire with a two-year-old sitting on it. He is wearing a drool-coated bib
and no underpants, and has yellowish powder on his cheeks - not sand, but
the face paint of the Karen tribespeople, who live in the mountains of the
Thai-Burmese border.
It looks like a building site, but it’s the Baan Dada orphanage (www.baandada.org),
located seven hours northwest of Bangkok, beyond the bridge over the River
Kwai, where the Death Railway was blasted through the hills to Burma.
The orphanage is run by Dada, a neohumanist missionary from Manila, and is
home to 52 children, refugees of the bloodshed between the Burmese military
and oppressed Karen villagers.
Some, like Nongdee, a beaming eight-year-old in shocking-pink shorts, saw
their fathers murdered in front of them by soldiers. Others trekked miles
across the viper-stalked malarial mountains to reach Thailand, their
siblings perishing on the way. I’m here with Hands Up Holidays, pioneer of a
new kind of travel experience that blends upmarket sightseeing with
volunteer work. The company was started by Chris Hill, a lapsed financier
who went to Guatemala to teach English, loved it and thought other busy
professionals might fancy something similar.
“Our trips are two-thirds holiday, one-third volunteering, and completely
hotel-based,” he says. “But you’ll get to interact with locals in ways not
possible for ordinary tourists.”
It’s an appealing idea, and with other tour operators catching on fast, it now
has a name: voluntourism. But can just a few days’ mucking in really help?
Ethically, that’s a vexed question. As Hands Up’s first volunteer at Baan
Dada, I’m here to find out.
The children don’t pay much attention to my arrival. They’re far too busy
digging in the sandpit, falling in the stream, poking sticks into sleeping
dogs, skinning snakes and playing Beatles riffs on a battered Yamaha organ.
After a bit, Dada returns from the market. “Is it possible for me to help,” I
ask, “in such a short stay here?” Dada’s answer is disconcerting. “Unless
you’re here for at least a month, you’re a visitor not a volunteer. You will
probably just play with the children...”
That’s a challenge. In three days I’m off to my luxurious Kanchanaburi
riverside resort for a week of temple excursions and Thai massage. If I’m
going to “make a difference”, I’d better get weaving.
Except that I’m no good at weaving. Nor teaching. Nor DIY. I remember what
Chris said earlier: “It doesn’t matter if you have no specific skills, so
long as you’re proactive. The children are pretty self-sufficient, but there
are always jobs if you look for them.”
Baan Dada’s main work in progress is a girls’ dormitory, which is being built
from adobe bricks made with earth, water and rice husks, all trodden
together like grapes. So I set about mixing concrete to support the
building’s frame – shovelling cement, lugging pails, pausing occasionally to
make a sand castle with the little ones. We’re at it for four hours, our
work party swollen by the teenage lads from the home; even Ali Baba, the boy
in the bib, drags out a hose to water the mix.
Night comes, and we’re still going, labouring in the Dante-esque glow of two
flickering flashlights. By now, I’m drenched to the waist and barefoot, my
sandals discarded, a waterfall of sweat threatening to wash away my
spectacles.
But we get the job finished - and later, back at my hotel on the romantic
lakeside at Sangkhla Buri, I enjoy the most meaningful shower I’ve had in
years. I’m blowing concrete out of my nose, excavating it from my ears. And
I feel great.
The next day, improbably, the work gets harder. Dada has decreed that we’re
going to hand-dredge boulders from the stream to build steps. After two
hours of lifting and laying, it feels as if the mortar has seeped through my
skin and solidified in my forearms. The soft pads under my fingers are no
longer blisters, they’re just circles of flesh. I’m so weary that I start
using the snake holes in the river bank as footholds.
After lunch, though, I’m saved by Nongdee, the girl in the pink bloomers, whom
I discover arranging alphabet cards on a kitchen workbench. We spend half an
hour spelling out our names, a gaggle of yellow-faced youngsters gathering
around us. They win jellybeans from my rucksack for their intelligence; I
win an afternoon teaching English to the “kindie kids” in their mud-hut
classroom.
By day three, I’m on first-name terms with at least a dozen of the older
children, and dangling a toddler off every fingertip. Some are even catching
snakes just for me – one has a full-grown toad inside it. I’d trade any
number of riverboat cruises and five-star suppers in Kanchanaburi to spend a
few more days here.
But it’s time to go. On balance, I reckon I’ve got more out of my stay than
the Baan Dada orphans. But I will definitely do more volunteering - and
Chris later confides that, with short-term volunteers, that’s secretly the
point.
Dada’s goodbye handshake is quite a bit firmer than his welcome one. But it’s
nothing compared with Nongdee running over, grinning, to high-five my
blisters.
Travel details: a 14-day trip to Thailand (0800 783 3554, www.handsupholidays.com),
with three days at Baan Dada, four nights in Bangkok and two in
Kanchanaburi, costs £1,685pp, B&B, including excursions and all
transfers, but not flights. Options include Thai Airlines (0870 606 0911, www.thaiair.com)
and Eva (020 7380 8300, www.evaair.com),
both from Heathrow.
Other voluntourism adventures
Home-farming in Sri Lanka
Explore (0844 499 0901, www.explore.co.uk)
is launching 14 new volunteer tours for 2008, with destinations including
Argentina, Cambodia and Morocco. Its two-week itinerary in Sri Lanka has you
spending three days planting, irrigating and composting to help villagers
develop sustainable food sources; you’ll work and eat with the locals and
maybe take part in guided meditation sessions. This is teamed with visits to
tea plantations and the Udawalawe elephant orphanage. August and October
departures cost £1,370pp, including flights from Heathrow and most meals.
Cat-cuddling in South Africa
Safari holidays are all very well, but at the Cango Wildlife Ranch in South
Africa you’ll get slightly closer to the fauna. A two-week tour with
i-to-i (0800 011 1156, www.i-to-i.com),
now part of the First Choice group, combines wine-tasting in the Western
Cape and canoeing on the Garden Route with 10 days of mucking in (and out)
at the world’s biggest cheetah contact centre. You could be bottle-feeding
the cubs, playing fetch with Bengal tigers, even helping dress the wounds of
an injured lion. One of 19 “meaningful tours” worldwide, it costs £995pp,
including some meals, but not flights.
House-building in Ecuador
Gap-year expert The Leap (01672 519922, www.theleap.co.uk)
offers three “mini-leaps” in Kenya, Mozambique and Ecuador. With the last of
these, you’ll live for two weeks among the hunter-gatherer communities of
the Amazonian jungle, under the auspices of the Yanapuma Foundation. A range
of work options includes thatching village buildings and running
after-school clubs. Spend time off trekking or whitewater rafting. Two weeks
cost from £795pp, including all meals, but not international flights.
Furniture-making in Kenya
Gap Year for Grownups (01892 701881, www.gapyearforgrownups.co.uk)
offers 80-odd trips of under a month, from elephant-rescuing in Jaipur to
English-teaching in Venezuela. For maximum immersion, opt for its Kenya Camp
Life programme: two to four weeks working with the staff of the Stephen
Kanja primary school in the Shimba Hills, which lacks electricity, textbooks
and desks. You’ll paint, build and teach sport and music, while lodging in
smart safari tents, with elephants and baboons yards from your flaps. Two
weeks cost from £892, with all meals, but not flights.
Favela-painting in Brazil
Samba away the mornings and paint the town all afternoon, with the
dance-holiday specialist Jingando (020 8877 1630, www.jingandoholidays.com).
It can tailor-make a fortnight in Rio that combines samba, salsa and
capoeira lessons at Marinho Bras’s renowned dance school with sessions
working on the Make Favela Art community project. Designed to pep up the
shanty towns above Santa Teresa, it aims to paint an entire hillside favela
so that it becomes a huge mural visible across the city, improving the
living conditions and self-esteem of the residents. Fifteen days in February
cost from £1,999, with flights from Heathrow.
River-cleaning in Egypt
On the Go (020 7371 1113, www.onthegotours.com)
has a new 10-day Eco Egypt itinerary: in Cairo, you’ll spend a day helping
at a shelter for homeless children, and another with a women’s cooperative
that makes handicrafts from salvaged textiles. Then there is a day or two on
a traditional felucca along the Nile - helping to spring-clean the river
bank. It’s a group trip with an Egyptology guide; departures in February and
September; £299, including some meals, but not flights.
Brits wanting to volunteer abroad to do hard manual labour and enjoy it, says more about our countries than the 'exotic' ones people travel all the way to at great cost to arrive unskilled. Would those people be as wiilling to muck in and end up with blistered hands helping out in their local British community for something that needed to be done? Yeah, didn't think so. Yes all this voluntourism is mostly selfish curiosity, and offsetting some guilt. Volunteers (unless coming with skills not present locally) are just a free labour novelty.
Speaking for myself as someone who volunteered 2 months in Russia at an orphanage, my view now is that if you REALLY want to help other countries then a written cheque to organizations in them is more worthwhile. I've lost count of how many people I read who include a volunteering stint in a several month south east asia journey, in an attempt to offset guilt about all the hedonistic lazing around they will do later on.
Banana, North West , Britain
Great article. It's true that short-term volunteering is the gateway for longer volunteering - it gives people a chance to try it out without committing to months (or even years) abroad. The number of short term volunteer projects has risen dramatically over the past year or two, because people want more out of their holiday than just lying on a beach or getting drunk.
If people are concerned about how good their volunteer organisation is, they can have a look at www.thecareerbreaksite.com. We only feature companies we would use ourselves.
Rachel Morgan-Trimmer
The Career Break Site
Rachel Morgan-Trimmer, Manchester,