Vol. 3 No. 1 Specials

As first-days go for teachers, mine was fairly easy. My students made no sound out of turn, they never switched names in order to confuse me, and they were focused on me during the entire class period. In fact, they were mesmerized. It wasn’t just that I was speaking to them in a language they never used with their families. It wasn’t just that I had a hair color few had ever seen. The students were mesmerized because I was teaching them about sex—a subject they never discussed. I was volunteering in rural Tanzania, teaching primary- and secondary-school students about HIV during the summer between my junior and senior years of college. Since the foundation of the Peace Corps by President Kennedy in 1961, volunteers have played a leading role in staffing international health organizations. Today, the Co-ordinating Committee on International Voluntary Service (CCIVS - a division of UNESCO) calculates that approximately 200,000 18- to 25-year olds volunteer abroad every year.

The first model of international volunteerism, however, emerged in the aftermath of World War I—two generations before the Peace Corps—in the small French village of Esnes. An international “work camp” was set up to rebuild the town, which had been razed during the Battle of Verdun. This astonishing cooperative effort between Europeans who months before had been waging war against one another played an important role in allaying wartime hatred. The Service Civil International, the first international voluntary organization, sprang out of the work camp at Esnes with the goal of “promot[ing] peace and intercultural understanding through volunteering.”

Since then, volunteering abroad has been both celebrated and assailed. Criticism aside, volunteers have indisputably left their mark across the globe. The Tanzanian host family I lived with, just outside the city of Arusha, referred to the “voluntee-ah” as a permanent position in the neighborhood, just like “store owner,” or “vegetable seller.” Arusha is home to a vibrant non-governmental organization (NGO) community, including the student-run NGO I worked for, Students for International Change (SIC). I decided to become part of that community primarily in order to learn for myself what the HIV pandemic’s “Ground Zero” – sub-Saharan Africa – really looks like, but I was also motivated to figure out what kind of impact international volunteerism really has. Ultimately, I concluded that while the scope of its influence is limited, volunteering abroad provides the opportunity to pursue the goals of international health in a uniquely personal, cross-cultural way.

When I arrived at Tanzania’s Kilimanjaro Airport, I certainly didn’t consider myself a starry-eyed utopian. I felt that I had realistic expectations. I knew that I would not be able to “save the world.” In fact, after reading several critiques of international volunteerism as part of the pre-field course required by SIC (notably, a 1968 speech by Ivan Illich, entitled “To Hell With Good Intentions”), I had become so disillusioned that I nearly decided not to go, fearing that my presence in Tanzania would be interpreted as neo-imperialistic, patronizing, and self-serving. Stripped of the conviction that the net balance of my entire trip would be positive, I was left to examine each of my actions, lesson plans, and conversations individually to ensure that I would not fulfill my gloomy predictions.