ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I examine Southern NGO staff members’ perspectives on international volunteers, including international service learning (ISL) students. These perspectives are derived from interviews carried out in Guatemala, South Africa, Malawi, and Zambia as part of a larger research project entitled “Creating Global Citizens? The Impact of Volunteer/Learning Abroad Programs” funded by Canada’s International Development Research Centre from 2007-2012.1 Local consultants were hired in a total of seven countries, including the ones focused on here, to interview two local staff members in each of 10 Southern NGOs, and five key informants who had “overview” perspectives, per country. Staff members were asked extensively about their experiences with Northern volunteers, particularly focusing on short-term ones who stay for three to six months. On the whole, the responses were quite positive. It seems that, from a Southern perspective, there is support for international volunteering to continue. However, there are also numerous “costs” associated with having volunteers, especially short-term ones (see Heron, 2011). These costs are exacerbated by the fact that such volunteers do not really get past the adjustment phase before it is time for them to leave. Critiques of issues such as this are often framed in term of neo-colonialism and post-colonialism (e.g., Benson, 2011). However, I want to suggest that what is going on in the responses of local staff to the adjustment travails of supporting young, short-term Northerners in Southern organizations cannot be adequately understood in terms of a neo-colonial or even a post-colonial encounter. To make this argument, I will first discuss the impact of the discourse and practice of helping in shaping the impetus for ISL and other kinds of short-term volunteering experiences, and the knowledge that these volunteers bring with them to the global South. Then, I will examine the relationship between neo-colonialism, post-colonialism, and First World helping as expressed in short-term, Northern volunteering. Following this, I will turn to data from the research in order to elucidate how ‘Othering’ is interwoven into descriptions of the behaviors of young Northerners in the accounts of the Southern NGO staff who work with them, and how these staff members respond in turn. This will be followed by an analysis of what the frame of
neo-colonialism, and its sometimes-interchangeable term post-colonialism, open up and foreclose. Lastly, I will propose the need for an alternative frame for thinking through what these encounters mean to Southern NGO staff.
