Poorism
Poorism – an elision of ‘poor’ and ‘tourism’ – refers to a model of tourism where wealthy and well-meaning individuals travel to poor areas, generally in the developed world, to witness poverty, vice and deprivation in the flesh. It has a long history but has recently been packaged up and commodified by companies offering volunteering holidays and ‘humanitarian tours’.
Humanitarian travel has a long history. Monks like Saint Columba, who founded the religious community on Iona, travelled long distances to bring their faith and compassion to other countries. In latter years colonial missionaries set out for Africa to minister to the people, brining schools and hospitals (as well as infectious diseases) to far flung places. Such trips were hard, uncomfortable and often dangerous. While it would be foolish to describe them as tourists, they were undoubtedly affected by the allure of distance and far away places.
This humanitarian imperative for far away travel appears to be in good health in the 21st century. Missionaries are still active and increasing numbers of secular volunteers and highly trained and often poorly-paid aid workers set off each year to try and help relieve those affected by warfare, drought, disease and natural disasters. In spite of the dubious consequences of many of their interventions, it is difficult to fault their commitment.
However, the recent expansion, cheapening and democratisation of air travel has spawned a new mode of encountering the impoverished other. Over the last ten years it has become fashionable and even necessary for future career development to undertake a short period of volunteering in the developed world. Middle class students fresh out of school or university take ‘gap years’ to teach English, help orphans, build houses or care for charismatic animals. Generally speaking these adventures take the form of six months in a poor but politically stable, formally colonised country in the developing world. Travellers work for a bit on an organised project and then take time to backpack around their host country.
This boom in extended trips has in part been driven by the marketing activities of a growing number of UK-based organisations who put volunteers in touch with local humanitarian holiday providing organisations, many of whom have spring up to service this demand and gain most of their revenue from volunteers. In exchange for considerable fees (c. £1500 a month) volunteers are reassured of their safety, they gain confidence in worthiness of the project and they guarantee that they will carry out their work with like-minded individuals.
Looking through the marketing materials for these trips the key phrase the keeps emerging is ‘making a difference’ – you to can make a difference in six months or less to a particular needy group. Your skills are required, they need you and you can have fun helping them. Having witnessed some of these projects firsthand in Southern Africa and Sri Lanka I am less certain. While there can be little doubt that most of these volunteers have fun and generally returned home as more rounded and mature citizens, it is not often clear what kind of difference they make. At best they bring some money into poor local economies and enable cosmopolitan cultural encounters. At worst, they undermine local economies, put money into the hands of nefarious local elites and unrealistically raise expectations. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
A starker and more alarming expression of this trend has recently emerged in the form of ‘humanitarian tours’. These are short breaks to poor countries, generally lasting between one and three weeks. Here the tourist mixes a few days volunteering on local projects with days on the beach and trips to sights of interest. This appears to be a peculiar way of providing an ethical gloss for the guilt felt by some when travelling to poor countries. I can not imagine this voyeurism achieves anything substantial for the local recipients – indeed if it achieved its stated objects it would destroy the very thing it is selling. Instead, like carbon offsetting, it commodifies the possibilities for atonement without addressing the roots of the problem.
