BABY FOOD | LETTERS ON

Correspondence continues to come in about the article in New Internationalist No. 4 "Volunteers: Killing with Kindness?". In that article, ex-volunteer Marie-Helene Matthews argued that volunteers in developing countries usually do more harm than good because they are not part of an overall development effort; because they are only filling in gaps in social services which otherwise would be filled by local people; because they are often immature and unstable; because their entire background makes it impossible for them to really communicate or share experience with the local people; because their standard of living and status are such that they innocently and inevitably become paternalistic and even racialist in their reactions; and because they help to maintain value systems and power structures which need to be changed if ever development is to come about.

In last month’s magazine, Sue Bullock and Alan Leather replied to the article, arguing that volunteers need not necessarily fall into these traps and calling on the volunteer sending organisations to form new policies to meet the growing criticisms of ex-volunteers. Their article was part of a campaign generated by Returned Volunteers Action (ex-VOSA). The authors are members of a working group which was set up following the VOSA Conference in 1972: "So How Would You Run A Volunteer Programme?". The working group was attempting to channel the dissatisfaction felt by many volunteers and the fundamental questions they were asking about the future of volunteer programmes. Returned Volunteers Action produced a report with recommendations to the sending organisations and are now pressing for the appointment of a researcher to evaluate the real effect of volunteers in the field. At the same time they are continuing their own research and collecting up-to-date feed-back through a questionnaire and conferences for newly-returned volunteers. If you have any comments, any relevant experience, or want to play some part in working for change, please contact Returned Volunteers Action, 26 Museum Chambers, Little Russell Street, London, WC1, Tel. No: 01 405 - 7277.

The letters published below are selected from a wide variety of correspondence received on this issue from ex-volunteers and others who have personal experience of this important aspect of the relationship between rich and poor worlds.

Dear Sir,

If all the volunteers in the world were laid end to end, one of them would be sure to jump up And accuse the rest of insensitivity to the local custom of sleeping side by side. The article by Marie-Helene Matthews in the last New Internationalist (Volunteers: Killing with Kindness?) is part of a long established tradition of anxious self-criticism by volunteers.

Miss Matthews argues that the colonial past and current cultural differences distort the relationship between volunteers and the local people, and that the net effect of a volunteer is to damage the self-confidence and social cohesion of the people he is supposed to be helping. (She even includes occasionally startling revelations about her own volunteer experience "I found myself arguing with my African headmaster about some reforms I wished to see implemented, even menacing him, because I knew it would be better..." which makes it seem that she was quite capable of distorting relationships on her own and didn’t need the dear old colonial heritage to do it for her.)

However, her first complaint is that "the volunteer concept does not fit into an overall effort by the rich world to help the poor world." If there were such an effort, volunteers should indeed be a part of it; since there is not, the accusation seems a hard one.

In fact, insofar as the rich world is making any kind of overall effort with regard to the poor world, it is to continue the use of the latter’s raw materials and primary products as a basis for the former’s prosperity.

Volunteers are by no means the only point of contact between the first and third worlds, and their effect is marginal in comparison with the armada of tourists, trade delegations, "investors", diplomats and cultural representatives - the "vultures" as President Nyerere has called them - who make their annual contribution to the continuing abuse of 80% of the world’s people. Of course volunteers can only scratch the surface of the poverty problem in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and of course they are going to make endless blunders in the attempt. Miss Matthews may even be right in her argument that they do not accurately approach an understanding of the people with whom they live for two years; but they do return identifying, however inaccurately, with the problems those people are facing, and many of them have subsequently played a leading part in setting up organisations within the developed countries to press for greater justice in the relationship between the rich and poor worlds. If the volunteers were all withdrawn, the vultures would remain; and justice is not high on the list of things they are pressing for.

It is a well-known characteristic of volunteers that one need only creep up behind them and whisper "paternalist", or better still "cultural imperialist", to throw them into a flutter of ideological confusion. Malicious people have been known to do it merely for the fun of the ensuing spectacle, although I am sure it was not in this spirit that the New Internationalist devoted three pages to those well-worn accusations. In case I am wrong, however, I would like finally to mention that it is an even more well-known characteristic of radical left pressure groups to spend much of their time and energy upbraiding each other for some minor heresy, or for displaying insufficient radical zeal, leaving the individuals and institutions whose business is full-time oppression and extortion quietly to get on with the job. I hope the New Internationalist will resist the temptation to pick on Aunt Sally and Uncle Tom when there are greater villains outside the family.

Robert Church,
Catholic Institute for International Relations Overseas Volunteers.

Dear Sir,

It was refreshing to read Marie-Helene Matthews’ frank and unidealised assessment of volunteering in the New Internationalist No. 4. It certainly chimed a chord in my own experience, which was as a VSO in a rural area of Zambia between 1966 and 1968.

It is unusually refreshing, I think, to find such an honest appraisal coming from somebody so recently returned from the field. There is a tendency in returned volunteers, sometimes distorting one’s perception of what actually happened for years afterwards, to rationalise the physical and psychological discomfort of much of the experience by glamorising it as a time of adventure, excitement, insight and achievement. This response also helps to buoy one up through the immediate period of culture shock on returning to one’s country of origin which can be more traumatic than the adjustments one had to make on arriving ‘out there’.

Much of what I remember about Zambia backs up what Marie-Helene Matthews says. One is allocated a superior status by most of the local people - and whatever one’s egalitarian ideals it is very hard to avoid accepting so comforting a definition of oneself, especially when it entails certain hard practical advantages, like being able to go straight to the head of the queue at the outpatients’ clinic.

When the volunteer leaves his home country he sees himself as poor - he is giving up things, the material rewards that might be expected to accrue to him as a result of his education. When he arrives at his destination, eureka! He has become a wealthy man. His clothes are in one piece, he wears shoes, lives in a proper house, maybe even drives a car. It is useless to explain to the local people that he is poor by his own standards. In Zambia I was asked for loans, sometimes of quite considerable amounts, and I knew that my explanations that I could not afford it were never believed. They were just taken as evidence that I was mean, like other Europeans. If the volunteer can convince people that the occupation he is following would bring in more money in his country of origin, this is usually taken to mean that he is a poor quality person who could not find such a job in his own country and so had to come here.

Having said which, I must add that I found there was a point, after a year and a half of struggling with the language, and after many afternoons spent sitting in the villages, when some kind of meaningful sharing of experience did begin to take place. It must be a commonplace to anthropologists I suppose, but it can be very moving when, over the multiple barriers of culture, language and education, one first hears a voice one can recognise, speaking thoughts that have also been one’s own. After one such ‘sharing’ experience one village woman turned to another and exclaimed: "You see! It’s only their bodies that are different, their spirits are the same." Did it mean as much to them as to me? I doubt it; it would soon be forgotten. For the most marked thing about the Europeans who appear in the villages is that sooner or later they all go away. People reacted with politeness but scepticism when I told them, meaning every word of it, that I would soon be coming back. Of course I never did. The life of the villages goes on much as before. The volunteer might be remembered sketchily as a brief interlude. But he is back with his privileges - where, as the villagers know in their deep scepticism, he inevitably belongs and from which he has no escape.

Lorraine M Gill,
Essex.

Dear Sir,

I find myself endorsing most of Miss Matthew’s article on the effectiveness of ‘volunteerism’, having spent three years in Nigeria with my husband, a secondary school teacher.

Although a graduate teacher, I went with the intention of employing myself as a wife to my husband and mother to our baby. Within three months of our arrival, a polite deputation of local people of standing in the community came to enquire how much longer it would be before I started work. Wellqualified teachers were badly needed and there were many girls who needed the money a job as my baby-minder would provide. So much for my demonstration of creative domesticity - I was lazy and selfish!

Our social status was a constant embarrassment to me - always being served before the queue at the Post Office or at the market. Protest caused affront. The reverence too, with which we were treated as social benefactors shamed me. One local pastor told me that there would be many white people in heaven but very few black. Numerous other instances could be cited in support of Miss Matthews’ critique. But surely these are the drawbacks of any social work done without gross deception? One needs to be taught to live with them and work through them.

We look back on our time in Nigeria with deep gratitude to the people whom we served. It has been of inestimable value to us personally in giving us understanding and compassion for the underprivileged both at home and abroad as we work in political, social and educational spheres. People must be told the problems of volunteerism before they go abroad. But saying that a thing is so is very different from learning by experience that it is so. Miss Matthews would have been unable to write that sensitive and constructive critique without just that personal experience.

To us, our time in Nigeria was an excellent lesson in experiential education into the height, length and depth of the problem of personal relationships in a Third World setting. Living as we are today in a ‘world village’ this would seem to me to be an important lesson for our leaders of the future to learn. Having learnt this lesson, we feel we are better equipped to take our part in the ‘integrated effort to give justice and the chance of economic development to the Third World’. I think one would learn the lesson with less depth in the more rarified sphere of ‘training the trainers’. The ‘just teaching’ and ‘just treating’ are as important. One needs to do both.

The culture shock we experienced on returning last Christmas to this grabbing, materialistic society has left an indelible imprint on my mind. However much I become acclimatized to society as we know it, I can never forget that shock.

I would like to emphasize that all the volunteers with whom I had contact went out to Nigeria with the best of intentions to serve. If they had not done so, then the value of their going would have been extremely limited.

Brenda M. Thomson,
Bradford.

Dear Sir,

As a British teacher who has recently spent five years in East Africa, though not as a volunteer, I find myself very largely in agreement with Marie-Helene Matthews’ article as to the pitfalls facing the volunteer in a country like Uganda.

But her article has an unstated assumption - that the volunteer is being employed by the host government as a convenient stopgap, and that he is acting in a political vacuum, or at least in a situation where government policy is unobtrusive. This has indeed been the case in Uganda, under both Obote and Amin, and is no doubt true in many other parts of Africa. The expatriate has been left to carry on as best he can, with little guidance as to what attitudes he is expected to adopt or as to how the government views his role.

The first part of my service in East Africa was in Tanzania (1966-68), and there the situation was entirely different. National policy in most fields was clearly articulated and conveyed to us through frequent ministerial visits and innumerable circulars. It was made clear that we were expected to help in the process of nation building and that we were personally welcome, but that everyone must work towards the much-desired day when we-were replaced by Tanzanians. Thus we were set clear objectives, initiative was expected to come (and largely did come) from Africans, and one could see oneself as a member of a team seeking worthwhile objectives rather than as a reluctant paternalist. This situation had its own difficulties, but certainly the peculiar position of the rich expatriate was made very much easier than in Uganda because his place was made clear to himself and to others.

So many of the very real difficulties which Miss Matthews refers to arise because traditionally the European has been the top man and the leader. If the host country can give an alternative view and clarify the position which the volunteer is expected to hold, then his position will be more modest, and his work more clearly worth doing.

J.M. Salter,
Lancaster.

Dear Sir,

I would refer to Marie-Helene Matthews’ article on Volunteers in your last issue and must say that I have rarely read an article fuller of half truths.

I travel throughout the world and see many dozens of volunteers and to speak of the majority in the belittling way of your article is cruel and unnecessary. I could point out many instances where volunteers have become integrated into the local society without a trace of paternalism or imperialism. My point is that there are still faults with the volunteer programme but most of those concerned with its future are well aware of them; there is much hope in the work they do and an effort to involve young people in the rich countries with the problems of the poor cannot be wholly wrong. Despite the contents of your article, both benefit. We must see that this benefit continues to increase.

M.R. Harris,
Overseas Aid Director,
Oxfam.