A Monologue of a Voluntourist

I am in the business of buying my own self enlightenment. I am the tourist who goes in search of the bigger picture, takes photos of cultural symbols to put on facebook, and finds ways of working my journey into every conversation. I am the target audience for the marketers of volunteer tourism brochures because I feel as though my soul is incomplete, and they are selling the missing piece. They are selling the journey which will lift the guilt of my consumerism, allow me to grow spiritually, and gain cultural capital all in one trip. I am a voluntourist.

I had finished my degree with “the world is my oyster” attitude but had a lot more learning to do. I wanted to shock my system, see the world, and come back with a new understanding. I needed to do something bigger than getting drunk in another city. It had to be something major, somewhere as far from home as I could get, where another country felt like another world.

Africa it was.



I had heard of volunteering overseas and it had struck a chord. It seemed as though it would provide me with the self discovery I was searching for - to find myself through the other. The brochures for volunteer holidays were printed on rough recycled paper full of pictures of big brown tear stung eyes begging at me, and innocent smiles framed with ragged clothes and dirty naked feet. These painfully cute village children begged for my help and love not only emotionally, but literally. “You will be there to give hugs and wipe away tears, to give the love they can only get from you” claimed the text below the smiles. Their innocence cut straight to my heart - the key to my bank account.



Where the glossy travel brochures sold places, the volunteer holiday brochures sold people. “Though having nothing, they are so content and happy” it told me. They were a people I wanted to be a part of, where happiness wasn’t earnt by an hourly wage. To help in a South African village would make the perfect contribution. I envisioned the hugs I would give, the lessons I would teach, the impact I would make, and those tears I would wipe away.

I saved up my Western dollars, thousands of them just to volunteer, but my volunteer company reassured me 70% of the fee would go to the project I was working on. That’s $2,100 or 14,700 Rand to go to straight to the children I was teaching. Suddenly my placement meant so much more than just teaching an alphabet. This was the real difference. Now the trip wasn’t just for my own cultural understanding or to put an extra achievement on my résumé. That money could buy hundreds of books, or feed the whole school for months. That money made the difference rather than just the wiping away of tears. It could prevent those tears from ever falling.




The glossy tourism brochures from the First World had portrayed Africa as an uncivilized no-man’s land, of lions, wild animals, ancient tribes, and survival of the fittest. Of bleeding sunsets over blood stained sand dunes, and deserts so hot they’re vibrating with energy.

On touching down in South Africa for the first time naivety consumed me. I tied back my hair, took off my jewelry, and hid my passport. In the taxi I locked my door as I recounted safety tips from Lonely Planet. What was I doing coming alone to South Africa? A young blond Australian girl in one of the most dangerous cities in the world, where there are fifty murders and ten cases of reported rape a day in Cape Town. And I was going into the thick of it, to work in the midst of it all with the victims of the city, where poverty and urbanisation mix like oil and water.

The sight through the taxi window of miles of shacks made from rusty wrought iron, wooden slats, and plastic sheeting was something I couldn’t have prepared my sheltered eyes for. The two worlds of cultural differences and economic inequality collided my one shocked experience. At first, the view of a township built up against the walls of mansions shattered my romantic notions of frontier experiences across African villages and deserts. Then South Africa's own culture clash of wealth and famine at its extremes woven between eachother. It was evident that the battle of survival of the fittest was still in full swing, and it was obvious who was winning.

The homes shuffled between the extremes of wealth and poverty, from beautiful mansions to squalid shacks. The mansions overpowered the shacks that clustered in their shadows, each of them guarded by cement gates, barbed wire, and electric fences. The razor wire atop thick cement walls bound the old English style homes, and each bore a sign warning of 24 hour armed security. These houses were mainly inhabited by the minority race of this country, the ‘white’ South Africans who made up four million of the forty seven million people. And while these 'white' South Africans were made up of an array of European forebarers, like the ‘black’ or ‘colored’ South Africans, they were generalised into first impressions of colour. Whilst there were some black or colored South Africans who lived in the affluent houses, never would you hear of such a bizarre idea as a white South African living in a township.

The trip from the airport to Cape Town, across the Cape Flats and around the foothills of those intimidatingly glorious mountains was a drive of confrontation. Having just come from the middle class Western Sydney bush, driving past the Khayelitsha township of half a million people where 80% live in shacks and there is a 25% infection rate of AIDS was a different world. And whilst I was always aware these worlds existed, I knew I did not fit in. My race and my bank account suddenly defined me unlike it ever had before.

Turning a few corners we pulled up to the volunteer house which was shaded in a pattern of green light and shadows cast by the trees arching over the roof and garden. The cement fence that bound the house was decorated in a mosaic of swirling colored glass, and fringed in a tangled curl of rusty razor wire like all the others I had seen.

The house sat on the shoulder of the South Afican township known as Immizamu Yethu, Xhosan for “My Struggle”. Designated for 2,000 people it was now home to 20,000. It was a mass of degraded cement block houses with shacks leaning against them or anything else with some stability. But not all the shanties were homes. Women had set up vegetables on the ground in front of their shanties to sell. There were hairdressers where girls would sit for hours having their hair braided, or shebeens where men would buy home brewed alcohol. Hanging on the door of a Sangorma or witch doctor’s home were two cow tails, beyond which they brewed remedies for anything from amnesia to HIV. The Sangormas were widely trusted over medical doctors by the township members.

Holding only twenty toilets for the entire township, sewage ran down the side of Mandela Road, the path which twisted between the sums and up into the mountain. Children walked through the runoff, jostling between the old cars serving as illegal taxis and the shanties spilling onto the road. But there was vibrancy, an excitement that rose above the stench. African gospel songs crooned through the nooks and crannies of the township, uplifted with a chorus of voices vibrating with energy and spirit. People were joyful and laughing, happily surprised to see a white person in ‘black territory'. Yet drowning out the faithful melody was the beat motivated R&B music which the kids danced along to. A seven year old girl ground up against an equally young boy and imitated the video girls from the music clips they had seen. The light glimmering in the eyes of many of the adults was ignited with bloodshot veins and dilated pupils from the drug and alcahol addictions infesting the shantytown.

The next morning I hitch-hiked to the school I was to work in. My volunteer leader Rachel had sent me off with fifteen Rand in my pocket, unfazed by my inexperience to the form of travel and my little courage to ride with strangers. She would have been the person who decorated the cement wall in mosaic. Her hair was a pattern of black and pink patches and she wore long African skirts with scarves fringed in ribbons and bells tied around her hips. Her buxom figure filled her low slung singlet top and her entire body bounced with every movement she made. She practiced yoga and hoola-hooping every morning, and sewed buttons on everything from her earrings to her underwear.

Carrying the organic lunch she’d made me and walking out onto the street, the racial divide was everywhere I looked. White South Africans driving to work, black and colored South Africans on the side of the road waiting to hitch illegal taxis; usually old dying cars. I waited for the silver BMWs to pass and stuck my finger out at an old brown bomb car. Opening the back door, two huge ‘African Mamas’ looked back at me for a moment, before turning their bored gaze back to the windscreen. I did my best to squeeze inside the car, one hipbone jutting against the door and the other against the soft cushion of thigh, watching and wondering what the school would be like after seeing the township.



The shock of familiarity can be more confronting than the shock of the unknown. But when the two intertwine within a foreign destination there comes confusion. A crashing confusion of what to see, what to ignore, and what to feel that can be harder to handle than any foreign food sickness.

When I got out at the school I experienced a different type of culture shock. Reverse culture shock, taken aback by familiarity rather than difference. Where were the ragged clothes, the tear stung eyes and the naked feet? Instead I saw pressed uniforms and colored lunch boxes. The two story building was very modest, but not the broken down shacks or village huts I had been expecting from the brochure that had been made up of fashionably insightful statements about traveling, and pictures of poverty stricken - “yet happy” - children . Five hundred pairs of eyes who ranged from kindergarten to year nine watched me walk through the dusty gravel playground, where countless knees had been grazed before.



Although taken back by the normality of the school I settled in as I began to assist a year three teacher who cared for sixty children. Her English name was Miss Anne and she was one of the younger teachers. She always wore tops an inch too tight or short for her, and her g-strings constantly crept above her pants. Yet she was liked by the children because she rarely used the cane which was unusual in this school even though corporal punishment has been illegal since 1994.

When at first I had been distracted by the clean uniforms, I soon found out the real struggles of these children's lives. They all came from the Immizamu Yethu township my volunteer house stared at, and these pressed uniforms were some children’s only clothes. The one meal of maize provided by the school was often their only meal each day. On Mondays they were always ravenous.

“Keep an eye on that one.” Miss Anne pointed to Kyle, segregated in a desk at the front doing his work with his head hung low over his book. “His mother and father died of HIV and his Grandmother is on tik. He causes me so much trouble and will go nowhere,” she said glaring at him. Tik was infesting Immizamo Yethu. Known back home as Crystal Meth, it could be made out of kitchen chemicals and was sold for twenty cents a hit. Tik was everywhere, impacting on each and every person of the shantytown and adding to the other problems of AIDS infection in the shantytown.



The class was made up of children who spoke Xhosa, Zulu, or Afrikaans, and English as a second language for some. I sat down with a group of four girls who were all eight years old. I soon realised the language barrier I would have to overcome. Like most of the females of the township, Ayesha and Lindiswe had their hair braided in elaborate patterns. T’keyah’s hair was shaved close to her head which made her dark brown eyes stand out all the more, appearing almost bottomless. The very quiet Aviwe’s hair was short and frazzled, grimy and matted and sticking out from her head. Her mother couldn’t afford to have her hair braided like the other girls because she was another victim of tik.



T’keyah pointed to me and spoke in Xhosa, the clicks confusing my ears. Ayesha translated “How many daddies do you have?” she asked me. I told her one and they looked at me confused. “One?.. How many brothers and sisters do you have?” “Only one” I replied again. “Well then how many babies do you have?” “None”, Shocked they all laughed at me. “But you should be a mummy by now! Can’t you get a boyfriend?!” My translator laughed. Aviwe poked at her, softly submitting her question. “Do you have a bed?” I looked at Aviwe, her chestnut sunken eyes waiting for an answer. “Well yes, I have a bed. Do you?” “No!” the girls laughed at my apparent stupidity. “We’re not white!”

I repeated their questions back to them. Each of them had at least four fathers because their mothers had children to different men. The boyfriend question was confronting because it confirmed the cultural differences between us, fewer now because of traditions, and more because of economics. Because of the poverty many mothers encouraged their daughters to sleep with much older men in return for food and clothes for the family, or sometimes even money for themselves. The girls would come to school displaying their latest gifts of bags or dolls. Girls as young as eight were known to have ‘Sugar Daddies’. “It's because the place they live is usually only one room which they share with their entire family. The mother will bring a man home at night to sleep with and the children will be in the room if not even sharing the bed” the school psychiatrist explained to me.







In the last week of my month volunteering my placement was becoming trivialized within the frames and expectations of my mind. Was I really making any impact? Did they even need me? The classes were too large to consistently and fairly help everyone, and the cultural barriers were so challenging because we could barely communicate. The “life lessons of love and language” the volunteer holiday brochure had told me I would teach were now seeming more like another advertising ploy of the tourism industry. It was the new white sandy beach which had been photoshopped and fabricated. And I had been sucked in whole-heartedly - all the way into the centre of South Africa. What did I think I could really achieve in a month? I was barely learning ‘hello’ in the four spoken languages and soon I would have to leave. Not only that, after speaking with the teachers and the principal, it was obvious that the school was never going to receive any of the money I had worked so hard for. That money, for books and food, was being filtered back into the First World for administration and profit margins.



But worst of all, my being a part of this was my own fault. I realized I had come here to purchase my self-worth. To buy my cultural capital through their poverty. No matter how many times the volunteer tourism brochure reassures me that “they are happy - though they know they have nothing,” I couldn’t help but think they would indeed be happier with a proper roof over their heads, beds of their own, and certain futures. And I’m aware my presence underlines to them thier underprivileged position even more. They know that I come from a lucky country. One they were not lucky enough to be born into.



I am a voluntourist. I am the one who wants to go to a foreign land, to a place with just the right portion of exotic elements, but also enough Western comforts to be not too uncomfortable. It must be far away, but not too far from civilization so I can escape my destination if it all became too much, unlike for the people who I am here to help. The vices of poverty, disease, starvation, and drug abuse cannot be “hugged” out of its victims. This is the guilt that lingers. This is the feeling that burns long after I've left. I will help, but I will also leave. And when I do, the world as they know it will remain the same and unchanged. It would be no different if I had never come. This was a different kind of culture shock. The shock and guilt of reality. This was the self enlightenment I had paid for.