@CCDD14 Suzy’s admissions op-ed made me roll my eyes because she’s well off, with an older sister who’s an editor at the Wall Street Journal (a hook she’s tapped to get published 3 times — and prob helped with her internships). She used satire to poke fun at admissions branding, but she is obviously savvy enough to play the game and certainly did — it’s just her attempt didn’t deliver a T10 acceptance letter. According to her linkedin, Suzy is a rising junior at Univ. of Michigan’s Ross School of Business — one of the top undergrad business schools in the world. It’s not like she ended up taking U of Phoenix courses in her parents’ basement.
I grew up spending every summer on what is now termed “service trips.” Back then, it was just “helping out.” My family organized groups of kids from out little Boston-suburb church to go into NYC and work tearing down a building (and building it back up!) with Habitat for Humanity. I went to Peru with Habitat, to India, to Mexico. I joined a walk from Portland Maine to NYC to raise money. Now the church does HUGE (15 bus loads) trips down to Appalachia (just left this week).
I have to say it was pretty life changing. International experiences can broaden a kid in a way that nothing else can. Seeing how other people live is life changing. Learning that you can be friends with people that don’t look like you is life changing for some kids.
I get that the pictures may be jarring now that social media has us swamped with them. But come on, these kids do this, for the most part, with a pretty innocent heart and a pretty un-jaded outlook.
I think it is very snooty to be turning up our noses and saying these are not genuine experiences for the kids. They are kids after all. They did a little good. The saw something new. The learned something new. That should be enough.
I think @CValle just articulated perfectly exactly what I wanted to articulate in my last post
Kids from our church are going to world youth day. They know they aren’t saving the world, that they are getting a great trip for themselves and that they are on a religious mission. They’ll do some service projects, and they’ve already done a lot of work to earn the money to go, work which helped their home community. They helped out at church functions, held fundraisers, sold things. I think they had to rise $150k as a group, and they did not just ask their parents for the money. Why shouldn’t they send picture with an orphan or of them working in a soup kitchen in Poland? They’ve work in plenty locally.
I have an adopted child. I could have just sent money and helped 100 kids go to school or get vaccinated. Selfishly, I wanted a child for myself. I don’t see a problem with wanting to go on the trip and help a cause too, with the kids traveling and learning a little, or a lot, from the experience and I think they do learn more if they go and see it, if they do bring the collected clothing and shoes, if they experience how hard it is to tote water from a well.
I think any activity no matter how “contrived” that brings people together and makes the world a smaller place is a great activity. There is no way to know how meeting others unlike yourself will affect you or them.
Some of you folks are stating there are books written about how harmful this is to those being helped. I would be interested in learning more about that.
I desperately try to look for the good in people although I find myself falling into old age cynicism more and more.
I don’t know. Who am I to determine someone else’s motives in these instances.
I have no dog in these service trips - my kids never did them.
But in light of things like Brexit, whipped-up fears of immigrants, the Syrian refugee crisis, isolationist/protectionist trade policies, and talk of walls to be built … I see a lot of good to the idea of exposure to the concept that we are a global village and not just a local, tribal one.
Wow! This offensive. My one kid is currently on one of those trips which is entirely funded not by me. There are rich and poor kids on the trip. And I wouldn’t call it a walk in the park. They are sleeping in extremely hot conditions, there is risks of diseases, and no access to Internet. (“So no posting of the obligatory picture.”)Our high school, like most high schools require a service project. This same child was an assistant for a dance class with little white girls. My other kid would never go on one of these trips. The child is not doing it for her resume for college. She’s doing because it just change her worldview.
I am a cynic and view “service” by HS kids with apprehension. Once I helped with MLK day project painting at the local disadvantaged school. The teens I was with made so much mess with paint I had to stay behind to clean up. They and the group leader, another parent, were more interested in “clocking”. They conveniently did NOT notice the mess they made and left. I could have left, too but inconveniently I couldn’t help noticing the mess. All this emphasis on service should be reassessed.
Igloo, the kids and adults were just really inconsiderate in your description. They need better role models in how to behave. Their behavior would probably be the same painting their own school walls.
Adults that set limits and model appropriate behavior are a must.
Somehow, my generation of parents seem to allow bad behavior of kids as some sort of weird right. Heaven forbid Johnny clean up after himself. He is just too busy and, oh yeah, someone else will clean it up.
Totally separate problem from “service” requirements.
As usual, there is some really intelligent and interesting posts on this thread. We all take our own perspectives on things but that doesn’t mean one can’t learn and modify one’s position. I’m a cynic of these trips too. For a middle class, or upper middle class guy like me, trips like this would be considered a waste of good money even if they were subsidized by the local church or some other organization.
We know of far too many families nearby who need help to travel across the globe and spend all of ten minutes there. That just doesn’t make sense to me. However, if I were the parent of a kid who did a trip like this and it gave them a new perspective on life I’d defend those trips too so maybe I am completely wrong.
My kids did local charitable activities in all honesty because they were trying to get the service hours for the Florida Bright Futures Scholarship. Would they have done those things otherwise? Probably not in all honesty. And one time their high school sports team had to spend an entire day helping a Special Olympics event (the SO kids played softball in front of their parents and friends and the kids on my son’s team had to help them run, pushing wheelchairs, and/or cheering and such). There was plenty of grumbling by athletes and parents and many families skipped the whole thing. My son went and didn’t even write down the service hours or report it anywhere.
He also came back at the end of the day deeply moved by what he saw.
I’ll never have to explain to him again that he is lucky to be able bodied. Life changing? You bet you backside it was and it was only one day and it was local. I don’t know who set it up but whoever set it up did a great thing for everyone involved and it didn’t cost a fortune or effect 10 kids. The SO kids were absolutely thrilled too. I saw the back end of it and happened to be standing there as the SO kids and their parents went back to their cars. You would have thought they just won the Super Bowl (which was the whole point).
he did pet rescue/pet shelter stuff also.
My oldest son did a charitable thing helping disadvantaged young people read and during the process of it all, it was like a summer long event, they had to write their own story and then read it out loud at a big summer ending event in front of their parents and such. It was a story about them it was any story they wanted to write to entertain the audience. My son, and a few other teen volunteers, got paired off with 4-6 kids and worked with them all summer. I’d pick him up each day and ask him how it was going. Life changing. Once again. I could go on and on but believe me it worked and it was local. I realize that many of the over seas trip kids do local and global stuff. I won’t crack on the kids who do it for the right reasons even if they realize what those reasons are at the end of the trip and yes, it is okay to have fun while doing it.
Sure, it’s a “waste” for someone to buy a plane ticket to Romania or Ghana when that money could have been used more effectively towards helping people here. By the same token, it’s also a waste to send our kids to $60k/year colleges when we could send them to community college and use the savings to send 10 other kids to community college. But I don’t see that coming under fire. I also don’t see pure-pleasure trips to Europe, which are posted about here all the time, coming under fire.
Over and over, people are describing how these trips are growth opportunities, life-changers, eye-openers, etc. for the kids who go.
And therein lies the issue, as far as I can see–it’s indeed using others as the instruments for one’s own growth. And this: “specifically to interact with the kiddos, build them homes and playgrounds, play with them, etc”??? I’m going to guess there was more playing and interacting than building in most cases, with the assumption, I guess, that they need privileged kids from America to “play” with them.
Some people here talk about established, long-standing ties of groups of adults who go to the same place and have ability and knowledge of what’s needed in the place they have a working relationship with. That’s way different from the one-timer “growth experience” for children that the OP is talking about.
I don’t see the similarity. People don’t go pleasure trips for lip service or 60K colleges for bragging rights.
@Corinthian wrote
Your church member doctor who went on the mission trip is a professional w skills that are in high demand in Malawi. He isn’t a chaperone-needing HS student.
Sorry. I’m still totally cynical about these int’l service trips. Our family has lived in a developing country and seen real poverty (not the US kind of poverty-lite) on a daily basis. The money that White Savior Barbies raise from bake sales to pay for their travel & expenses for a couple of weeks of kumbaya and a college essay topic could support a family for a year. These impoverished people would be better off if you wrote a check to them or to an NGO that already has boots on the ground.
Both my kids did a study-abroad program to a developing country, organized by their high schools. One kid went to South America, the other went to Asia. Each program plugged in a visit to an orphanage in the itinerary. Neither of my kids mentioned or plan to mention the volunteering portion of it on college applications, because because they both think doing so is a joke.
One of my kids did a few trips like this and I’m not knocking it. They did some worthwhile projects and as ducky312 says it was not a week of “vacation” , it was work. In my child’s case it was listed on college apps but far below her extensive involvement in an certain EC, it wasn’t mentioned in essays, etc.
My other child was not interested in doing this. He did participate in a number of local service projects including a few ongoing activities in which he had a high interest.
I don’t see why people should be bothered by this. If you don’t want your child to do this, don’t do it. If you don’t like the FB pictures, move on. It really isn’t your business.
Locals may not think it was much of work. I did a similar thing when I was in college. It was work for me, a lot of work. It was exhausting and I collapsed every night. For locals what we did was not much of work. I later learned that they put up wtith us because we brought stuff and money they could use.
I have been looking into service programs for my daughter who is a rising junior and who is interested in traveling abroad. I have looked into various programs (e.g. Rustic Pathways, church-related, etc.) and read about pros and cons. From what I have learned, the possibility of damage outweighs potential benefits depending on the expertise of the volunteer (doctor vs. untrained high school student) and the type of program (short-term vs. long-term). I have shared these resources with my daughter and we are thinking of separating the two: sustained service at a site in our city throughout the school year and a trip abroad to experience a different culture in the summer.
@sax You asked about information about possible harm from these service trips and one NY Times article that came to mind was a recent one that talks about issues with orphans and attachment disorders (from groups of strangers coming to play and then leaving over and over again), local masons out of work for days while unskilled teens try to build houses, etc. The second article has a list at the end of several additional resources.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/22/magazine/the-voluntourists-dilemma.html
http://almost.thedoctorschannel.com/14323-2/
I honestly had not thought about all of these issues. Many of my daughter’s friends and classmates go on overseas service trips and the school loves to highlight them at assemblies, in newsletters, social media, etc. It seemed to be something to aspire to. Previously I believed that helping others, with good intentions, could only result in a positive outcome. Now I am not so sure.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/pippa-biddle/little-white-girls-voluntourism_b_4834574.html
Read more at http://almost.thedoctorschannel.com/14323-2/#LqroUg52w2iwjD89.99
this latter article I especially recommend people read fully.
Edit: crossposted with Magnolia Mom.
Possible harm? Poorly done paint job is very hard to correct, improperly planted trees are waste of seedlings and set you back a year until next plating season, etc.
That NYT article you linked is spot on.
Hey! I just noticed that was your first ever post on CC. Welcome! And awesome first contribution.