What an unpleasant thread. Most kids, even wealthy and even white, have a kind heart. If they do something nice for a younger kid, brown or not, that’s a good thing.
My kids never did these. However, I am not against such trips. Not everyone does things (whether service trips or something else) to look good on a college application. Sometimes kids truly are interested in a certain activity for its own sake. There are travel programs that add a service component that is meaningful for some kids. Even though my kids never participated in these things, I do know that the activities they chose to do they did out of interest and not to get into college and I don’t think they are unique in that way. Yes, I am sure there ARE indeed kids who pick such activities (or other ones) for the purpose of college admissions. But I don’t look down on the choices some make because some really do such activities due to genuine interest and enjoy and get something out of the experience. I don’t frown upon that.
The trips/projects themselves are one thing. Displaying these children in promotional imagery for oneself is a different thing.
I’m not sure I see the difference. If I show the picture of the house I built without the people, I’ll be accused of whitewashing (ha ha) the project. If I show the house and the kids, I’ll be accused of using them as props. Sometimes - cliche alert -you can’t win for losing and no good deed goes unpunished.
@mstee Up to 100 because it seems to be 4 or 5 local groups from churches and high schools scheduled trips right after the semester ended? And there are also family pairs who seem to be on bespoke noblisse oblige trips.
I’m not sure you need to promote your charitable works on social media at all, but I’m pretty sure the kids in these pictures didn’t help build any houses. As depicted in these images, they are recipients of generosity, not role players in their own story.
Look, I was president of a basketball league in Detroit (I grew up just outside of Detroit). I also coached basketball and a few other sports in that league. Yes, the overwhelming majority of them were black and brown kids. I was with that league for 15+ years between being a player, a coach, and a president.
I get that there are people who do stuff in their backyard and abroad that is actually doing good in the community. But you’re kidding yourself if you think those 10 day trips are doing more good than harm. There are volumes written on how detrimental the white savior BS is to communities- especially abroad.
That’s not being negative- that’s being realistic.
“And there are also family pairs who seem to be on bespoke noblisse oblige trips.”
I don’t know. I don’t like to second guess motives. Some people really are social justice warriors (in the non-annoying sense of the word). They go on to work for non-profits, NGOs, Peace Corps, UNICEF, etc. Or they become ministers/rabbis/etc.
I am proud of the fact that my 16-year-old loves to do service trips. His youth group leader has a “pick it and stick it” motto, meaning he leads groups to the same locations year after year and builds upon the work and relationships developed through past goodwill. My son has done multiple trips to Skid Row and Mexico, and is super excited to go to Swaziland next summer (a village that the church has been visiting yearly for 19 years now). They also do local service projects. These are not luxury vacations - the kids work their tails off. For those of you begrudging the FB posts or college essays of kids choosing to spend their weekends and vacations in service to others who live in extreme poverty, with AIDs, with mental illness, etc., you may not understand how truly life changing those experiences can be for our privileged kids. They are being blessed as much or more than they are doing the blessing. The FB (or more likely, Instagram)) posts are not prompted by pride, but by them feeling humbled by the experience. Teenagers post about everything - of course they are going to post about a service experience. Give them a break! Somehow, I am guessing you are not offended by FB posts of all the kids in front of the Eiffel Tower enjoying Europe this summer (which, BTW, I have no problem with; my older son chose the big Europe trip over missions).
One of those short trips is what got my son involved in helping Syrian refugees. When he moves to Lebanon on August 15, I don’t know when I will see him again. He’s in it for the long haul. He’ll be going to school full-time, but also volunteering in the camps three times a week. His goal is to become an English teacher there after he graduates.
No havent seen that one, but I did read a long post that sounded so unbelievable, about the hot, sweaty, buggy, conditions and the lady next door dying and I thought it sounded too horrrible to be possible, must have been made up, but then I remembered who the author was…Maggie Doyne, and her charity Blink Now, and I realized it was all true. And she does post some pics of herself with many brown children, her adopted children, but they are in Nepal not South America.
My D did not do any service trips. But our church does several each year. Our church has a longstanding relationship with a Christian orphanage, crisis nursery and feeding center in Malawi. We send a mission team each year that sometimes includes a high school student. They take much needed supplies and funds. Sure we could just ship the supplies and wire the funds, but the human connection is also vital and frankly seeing pictures and hearing stories of one-to-one contact inspires donations from our members. The junior high and high school groups also do domestic mission trips to inner city locations and a nearby reservation. And the vast majority of the students who participate have no aspirations to go to highly selective schools. They are just regular kids who want to do something they consider worthwhile and a little bit outside their normal comfort zone. One of our adult youth leaders is a returned Peace Corps volunteer, and all of the youth leadership is active in mission work.
“Somehow, I am guessing you are not offended by FB posts of all the kids in front of the Eiffel Tower enjoying Europe this summer”
This is an excellent comparison. The black kids are serving the role of landmarks in these pictures. They’re the Eiffel Tower of Africa. In Europe, we don’t get local children to pose with us as a record of the trip. Pictures of Kilimanjaro wouldn’t raise any of these issues.
I don’t expect the teens to figure this out on their own. I do think it’s the job of the adults in their lives to explain the complexity here.
“also volunteering in the camps three times a week.”
That’s wonderful.
If you go on a service trip to, say, Romania you will pose with white kids, because that was your experience and you liked being with them.
Going to Africa and posting no photos would be odd. Posting photos, but none with kids (because they are black or brown) would be odd.
I’ve written this before on CC. I have a pretty cynical point of view about some service trips, and certainly about the couple of “service” trips I sent my own kid on.
There are people and groups and trips that do real good in the world. I know people who do those trips. They go year after year, they have actual, needed skills of value, their groups travel cheap (vans or busses if possible) and live a bit rough. Some of these people are kids who travel with their church groups. They are “real”. They can tell you the purpose and accomplishments of their mission trips.
And then there are kids who do a trip the summer before they spply for NHS, purely because the NHS application requires a certain number of documented service hours outside of school. And maybe another trip the next summer, because they can cram their required service hours into a week or two, and see a new place. They have no skills, are not interested in learning any new skills, and don’t really want to be uncomfortable or dirty. They want to do service lite., and want to do it somewhere far away.
The thing is, there is so much need for actual, real help within an hour of our snug little county, nestled safely between the worst areas of Baltimore and DC. There are homes to be fixed, children to be fed, students to be tutored, elderly people who need help, there are needs for medical and dental services, there are urban summer day camps to be staffed… So much to do right here, less than an hour from home.
Nobody from my county ever needs to travel to offer service to needy areas. Those areas are right here. But Baltimore isn’t very sexy, and DC doesn’t come with a great story. At least not if this is where you grew up.
“This is an excellent comparison. The black kids are serving the role of landmarks in these pictures. They’re the Eiffel Tower of Africa. In Europe, we don’t get local children to pose with us as a record of the trip. Pictures of Kilimanjaro wouldn’t raise any of these issues.”
The teens (at least my son’s youth group) go to their sites specifically to interact with the kiddos, build them homes and playgrounds, play with them, etc.That is what the trip is about, so that is the focus of their pictures, just as we would post pictures with our friends if we took a trip out of town to see them. They are not treated as landmarks - that’s so dismissive of their motives. Schools and houses and recreation buildings and playgrounds have been built. With the construction of the school and playground in Swaziland, child trafficking within that village has been virtually eliminated because the kids now have a safe place to go. 99% of the kids on these trips are there with no motivation other than to serve others. Most of them aspire to small Christian colleges that don’t require a knockout application. Why so cynical?
I have a dear friend (now 51) who changed her life course and became a nurse after a mission trip to India during college. My niece decided to become a doctor directly because of her 3 trips serving in Haiti. These trips can absolutely be transformative.
For what you’ve spent in airfare to Mexico & Swaziland a cash donation to an NGO could have achieved a helluva lot more.
Plus by sending “free” unskilled labor to these countries, you’ve undercut the local job market.
Although people do tend to put down these service trips often, I do think they can serve a worthy purpose. They can help students realize how privileged they are and encourage them to help out in their local communities when they get back home. It can put them in touch with a local culture that they were never aware of and encourage an exchange of lifestyles. It can widen people’s worldview beyond just the tourist areas of a country. It’s better than simply taking a week off at a cruise in the Bahamas. I do have problems with the commodification of a people and sometimes people’s trips do more harm than good, or fail to have an effect at all, but this differs by organization and purpose.
Overall I do not think all service trips abroad are bad. I know several students from my colleges participating in SOMOS and MANOS an organization that works with local communities to meet their needs and open up clinics where they can help local residents. Other organizations that seem to have an positive impact include the Social Entrepreneurship Corps which intend to train students who are able to in turn empower the villagers to start their own businesses and reach their goals.
The thing that tends to bug me more is when people on social media post that they have had their life-changed by a service trip because “we don’t realize how lucky we are every day” and uses it in turn to lecture other people about their trip. (If this is the cases, they need to get out more) Or create a gofundme page for their trip, but not for helping out the local community, but asking for funding for the trip itself. (They could volunteer at home without having to spend exorbitant costs… for some reason the notion of asking others for money to pay for the trip bothered me) But yeah, much of that could be done more effectively without spending thousands of dollars, or at the very least it could be used by organizations with trained professionals in the field
For some reason I immediately though about Kinto who changes lives:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324000704578390340064578654
@GMTplus7 your criticism of @westcoastmomof2 is awfully harsh and full of assumptions about what would’ve happened if they’d just sent money. Plus people also get criticized for just writing a check and not dirtying their hands or actually seeing poverty or disease first hand. Our church’s relationship with the orphanage in Malawi got started about 10 years ago when a church member who was a physician went on a medical mission trip. He was deeply moved and inspired, and came back and told everyone at the church about the orphanage. We then asked the orphanage what we could do to help and they made it clear that what they preferred was an ongoing supportive, personal relationship, not a one time feel good donation. And like with @westcoastmomof2 most of the kids at our church go to the local state university, community college, or small Christian colleges that aren’t super selective. They definitely aren’t doing mission trips for their college apps.