Comment of the Week 7/3/09-7/10/09

by Mariam Mostamandy · 2009-07-10 13:02:00 UTC
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The comment of the week is from Sara Larson on the When Not To Volunteer post. Her experience in Honduras is a great example of how volunteers can take away jobs from the very people they are trying to help.

Here is the comment:

"I couldn't agree more, and you articulated many of the frustrations I had as a recent college student watching so many well-intentioned organizations ship well-intentioned, yet unskilled and inexperienced, volunteers across the country and around the world to do jobs that locals could have benefitted from doing.  A recent experience I had volunteering in Honduras epitomizes this point.  I went there, not really knowing what I was getting myself into, as part of a team to help rural villages improve their access to clean water.  To make a long and sad story short, the sponsoring organization's method of "empowering" villages to create "sustainable" water systems (their language), was to send in a bunch of rich, non-Spanish speaking white kids to do what the Honduran villagers could have done 10 times better and faster.  I told my project leader at the end of the week that I would have rather given the money I paid to get to Honduras directly to the villagers as wages for doing the work themselves."

Sara, please contact me to choose your charity donation.

Mariam Mostamandy
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