On Immersion - My ten-day stint of voluntourism

The concept, from the cozy confines of my tree-house in Turkey, seemed simple. Arrive in India, receive help from a local to get settled, move to a rural village, spend a couple of weeks teaching  recycling to cute school kids. Simple, right? Wrong. This experience is still something I am trying to process, and has led to an entire other post about voluntourism.

As I found out, sometimes things are not as simple as they seem. While the organization I worked with, Silver Earth India, had the best intentions, the groundwork had simply not been done. The first issue was that I was expected to teach at school that was not in session 5 of the 10 days I was scheduled to be there, something I didn’t find out until the 4 days into my stay. While I understand that India has “more festivals than days of the year” I felt this should have been discussed with me when I arrived, not the day before school let out. 

My second day at the village school

And then there was the “job” itself. My task was supposed to teach and model trash disposal in a community that not only did not even have a local dump, let alone trash bins or garbage pickup. Furthermore, the community of approximately 100 families did not have running water or toilets, and many of the women (and I suspect men as well) were illiterate. So yes, recycling can be done, the use of plastic can be minimized, but in the grand scheme of things – shouldn’t toilets and education come first? It was hard to feel like teaching people to use a dumpster was the best use of my time, when many of the women there couldn’t read or write. The priorities were felt entirely wrong. 

Women of the village escorted me literally everywhere.

In addition to the trouble with the job itself, I was left by the program manager without a single person on site who spoke English, leaving me unable to communicate with my host family in any meaningful way. My living situation was in a shared room without toilets or running water. When I was not teaching, I was shuffled from one neighbors house to another like a zoo animal. While people were kind, I was as alien as well.. an alien. My desire to use toilet paper was a resounding scandal among the women (they clean with water and their left hand), and defecation was done in the open with no less than 2 other women around at all times. Showers were taken outside, topless but wearing a skirt (turns out, this can work, although the all-women audience made me self-conscious). People were far more interested in my travel pillow and my contact lenses than my teaching skills, and without the ability to communicate in words, I was left feeling dumb, helpless, and very much alone most of the time. 

Due to all of these things, I left the experience within a week. I did leave the village knowing a few words of Hindi (“I want to sleep” and “my stomach is not good” and “thank you for the food”), the kindness of the people who hosted me, and a HUGE and very real lesson about voluntourism (read more in the next entry). I learned that full and true immersion into a place where you don't speak the language is terrifying, mentally exhausting, and incredibly challenging. To overcome these challenges requires support, time, and ideally a community of others who are able to mentor you throughout the process. One cannot simply be thrown into a village and expect to “make people change.” 

My host-sister dried buffalo dung on the roof to make fuel for the fire

I don't disparage the ideals of the organization (trash is a huge problem in India), but I wish the program was set up to be more intentional, and that the impossibility of teaching without verbal communication could have been effectively addressed. I wish I had asked more questions before I arrived, and I know now what a serious undertaking something like this is. I ended up with my first ten days in India resulting in a good story, memories of kindness in an alien land, and intense, new-found gratitude for the simple and familiar comforts of things like pooping with privacy.