<p>I was really excited to have the opportunity to apply to go on a medical brigade in Ghana, but when I casually mentioned this to my parents, they adamantly refused, emphasizing that I will probably get an infectious disease from coming into contact with Africa’s sick. They also asked me whether I was planning on drinking water when I go to Africa. If yes, then I will probably get infected because the water is far from clean.</p>
<p>I continuously stressed how this would be a great, life-changing opportunity for me (I’m interested in medicine), but they said that it’s not worth losing my life, and that I should find other safer opportunities.</p>
<p>What are your thoughts? Do you think that volunteering in Africa is a good idea? If so, how would you convince my parents to let me go?</p>
<p>Let me ask you this: why do you want to go? It’s a safe thing to do, but medical brigade trips are either ignored or looked down upon by med school adcoms. Further, they do very little to actually help the local people. The reality is that while it makes the people on the trip feel good about themselves, it doesn’t bring about meaningful change in the communities they are supposed to serve. You aren’t qualified to provide any real medical assistance, so you won’t be doing much of any good. If you actually want to help people, volunteer in your local community in a hospital, or work as an EMT.</p>
<p>Whether it helps the locals- or helps the doctors helping the local people- depends on the program. And what you do depends on your experience. Why not volunteer in your home area, where you can also make a difference? You can do that without the extra costs, the immunizations, etc. And you can commit over a longer period of time. That will be life changing, too.</p>
<p>I will not pretend to know anything about your particular program. I am going to try for an answer to your question… sort of.</p>
<p>I am guessing you are at least 18 based upon how you set this up. If so, your parents really have little but advice to give about whether you go or not. Unless, of course, you are living off of their largess. If that is the case, then you need to wait until you are self-sufficient and then if you still want to go volunteer in Africa, enjoy. </p>
<p>From your parents’ perspective, you are their child. They have spent 18+ years protecting you from harm and doing what they could to keep you safe and prepare you for life. It is very hard for some parents (I would say most parents) to let their children spread their wings and fly. I don’t know their life situation either, but what if one of them could come along? </p>
<p>Ultimately, if it comes down to you truly needing to convince them to let you go, you are probably going to need to 1) put together data showing them how valuable the service really is 2) put together data showing them how safe it is. Be prepared that your research may or may not support your desire. If that is the case, you may want to consider other options.</p>
<p>Full disclosure: My godson did a college summer research thing in Africa. He survived. His was psych research on gorillas or something like that, so it does not equate.</p>
<p>It’s a really horrible disease w a 90% fatality rate. The victims cells pretty much melt and then oozes bloody fluid from from every bodily office. It’s VERY, VERY contagious. The doctors have to suit up in bio-hazard suits just to visit the patients.</p>
<p>They are having trouble quarantining the patients & victims
</p>
<p>I would wait till the outbreak is DEFINITELY over before heading over there. </p>
<p>Though you mention the specific country you’d like to go to once, in general you sort of talk about Africa like it’s an undifferentiated blob of a continent. I see a lot of mostly well-meaning people talk about Africa in that way, and it worries me.</p>
<p>I don’t know much about the program you would like to go with, but if they’re taking 18 year olds with essentially no medical training, I doubt that you would be doing much of anything. It would be far more cost-effective for them to use local assistants. If you want to help people in this community, you would do better to provide financial support for a local assistant than to go yourself, as that adds in, at the very least, the high price of a round trip flight. Not to mention that I’m sure a local will have an infinitely better understanding of his/her community’s problems than an outsider will, even if the outsider is well-versed. Just for starters, do you speak any Ghanaian languages? While it’s true that many Ghanaians with administrative jobs speak English, if you are trying to help people in disadvantaged communities, you’re going to find it difficult to speak to them without knowing Akan or another indigenous language. How much will you be able to help people you can’t communicate with?</p>
<p>Local knowledge goes both ways, of course. It makes more sense for you to volunteer in your local community than for, say, the American Red Cross to fly in a Cambodian teenager to help out. You know more about what your community needs and can be more efficient in helping. Shadowing a doctor or a public health official in your city would do you well.</p>
<p>Sooo,before you spend a lot of money to go volunteer in Africa with your minimal medical skills…how much have you volunteered in areas of great need here in the USA? In poor areas of your own city? In rural Appalachia or some areas of the south, or southwest? Indian reservations?</p>
<p>OP I know you probably got the opposite of what you were expecting with the responses on this thread, but you just have alot of good people concerned about your health and safety. If going the medical route, you could wait until you have obtained a medical degree an participate in Doctors without Borders and help out in that way. Right now, it seems that you are motivated to go along the medical track so for the moment volunteering at your local hospital or your community might be beneficial</p>
<p>If the person isn’t asking u to fund it, then it’s probably not necessary to pass sanctimonious judgement on how that person chooses to allocate her charity efforts.</p>
<p>It’s not unreasonable to want to combine charity work AND have an interesting cultural experience. </p>
<p>@GMTplus7 except for the fact that such trips often do more harm than good. There is really no medical assistance that someone with zero actual medical training can provide, and unfortunately, the cultural experience of such trips is really very exploitative of the people they are supposed to be helping</p>
<p>OP-My first question would be how much this volunteer opportunity is going to cost.</p>
<p>
This is not necessarily true. Such trips can be done in a way that benefits both the trip taker and the local community. If organized in a way that’s sensitive to the local community they can be a nice way to create cross-cultural communication.</p>
<p>That said, as someone who runs a non-profit working with impoverished communities in another country I’m generally skeptical of such programs. In my experience, in order to cover the real costs of the program non-profits have to charge participants an astronomical sum. Aside from airfare, the cost of housing, feeding and lodging (even as a homestay) far outweighs the value of the work an untrained volunteer can perform. We have chosen not to run service learning trips because we feel it’s wrong to require students to pay huge sums under the illusion that they’re providing valuable labor to the organization.</p>
<p>As GMT points out, there’s nothing wrong with taking a trip that provides an interesting cultural experience. What I’d ask people who take these trips to do, however, is to really think about whether this trip is to benefit the community served or whether it just a really cool way to see a new part of the world as more than a simple tourist. If it’s the latter, more power to you. Enjoy the trip, do some good and learn something about the world, just don’t go bragging to your friends (or god forbid colleges) about all the good you did for those poor natives. If it’s the former, consider that you could help these people more by donating a tenth of what you would have spent on your trip to a charity on the ground in the community which the organization could use to pay a local person to paint that school or fix up that community center.</p>
<p>For articles critical of such programs just google “voluntourism”. You’ll find a ton.</p>
<p>And to address your original question, organizations that run such trips go to great pains to keep their participants healthy. No one is going to have 18 year olds working with ebola patients. It’s most likely you’d be drinking bottled water and eating well cooked and in some cases specially prepared food. It’s bad PR to send a bunch of kids home sick.</p>
To be honest, I would be the same as your parents. However, I was often accused by my child that I always want to put him into a protective “bubble”.</p>
<p>Actually, his college is often accused by some people that it creates a “bubble” so that the students can live relatively safe within this bubble. This includes buying up properties near the campus and turns them into an upscale store so that it would not attract local people who have no business there. (Apple Store or up-scale clothing store is OK, but a pawn shop or “dollar store” is not.)</p>
<p>I heard of this story: About 30 or so years ago, the university hired somebody to help improve the safety of the community near the campus. The first day that the person was in the area to investigate the situation, he got mugged. The school knew that they really needed to be serious about doing something about it. I heard of the same that had been happening in other city as well, including NYC. But many would accuse them of inviting the rich (bankers, financial institutes) into that area and driving out the poor in the past several decades, oftentimes using some questionable means which might borderline discriminate or oppress some ethnic groups. But, hey, NYC is now in a much better shape in its safety.</p>
<p>Since OP is interested in medicine, many older, major hospitals are in a not so safe area in the inner city. OP’s parents may have a lot of worries if OP goes into this career path. Especially in the long training phase of anybody in this career path, the doctor-in-training is required to go to this area often at an odd hours (e.g., late in the evening or very early in the morning.)</p>
<p>Last semester, DS need to go into two “shady” areas (at different cities) where the typical college students would unlikely go into, often times at not so safe hours. This is where the hospitals are at and when the patients need them.</p>
<p>Just in case your driving skill is still not so good, improve your driving skill now so that you would not be afraid of driving into such crowded area/cities.</p>
<p>Thank you all for the feedback! I guess I just assumed that such a trip would be a worthy one to take without really doing much research or learning more about the country/continent/how beneficial the program actually would be for the people there.</p>
<p>Honestly, it wouldn’t even benefit you that much. Let the reactions in this thread be a guide to how many people view those who provide such ‘help’.</p>