Before our trek, we spent a week volunteering at a rural orphanage in the Chitwan region with an organisation called RCDP.
Voluntourism has a bad rap, and I was as cynical as any about it - children are not tourist attraction, I thought, and poverty is not some romantic ideal to be sought after and paid for to experience. And yet, with my Duke of Ed “residential project” still not organised for the year, I decided to leave my cynicism aside and give voluntourism a go.
The verdict?
I didn’t change the world. I didn’t leave a mark. But I’m pretty sure I did no harm.
We were placed in a village away from the tourist sites of Chitwan. The living conditions were trying: meals were served twice a day, always involving some form of lentils and potatoes; every trip to the “toilet” warranted courage and BYO toilet paper; snails crawled up the walls of the dark concrete box with a tap that was our “shower”; a buffalo lived outside our window, and a faint smell of shit permeated the air wherever we walked.
And yet, after three days of life in Chitwan, we stopped thinking about these inconveniences of everyday life, and started to notice the remarkable community that we found ourselves in - the idyllic rice paddocks that surrounded our host family on all sides, the croaking of frogs at night, the well-loved stray dogs that came and went whenever they pleased, the women who harvested rice at dawn and dusk.
Every day, school children, neatly dressed in their school uniforms, bid us good day as they cycled past on their bikes - the girls with white ribbons in their braids, and the boys with stiff collars and straight ties, their heads bobbing up over the rice fields as they make their way to school every morning. The children at the orphanage were so hard-working and well-behaved they put memories of myself at their age to shame.
No. I didn’t change the world. I didn’t leave a mark on these people’s lives. But I’m beginning to think that perhaps it isn’t about any of that. It’s about opening yourself to be changed, about allowing others to leave a mark on you.
It’s about understanding that as a tourist, sometimes the best thing you can do for a community is to tread lightly, to open your heart and mind, and ultimately to pass through, leaving with nothing but a different perspective of the world.
Our bedroom at the host family
The orphanage
Voluntourism has a bad rap, and I was as cynical as any about it - children are not tourist attraction, I thought, and poverty is not some romantic ideal to be sought after and paid for to experience. And yet, with my Duke of Ed “residential project” still not organised for the year, I decided to leave my cynicism aside and give voluntourism a go.
The verdict?
I didn’t change the world. I didn’t leave a mark. But I’m pretty sure I did no harm.
We were placed in a village away from the tourist sites of Chitwan. The living conditions were trying: meals were served twice a day, always involving some form of lentils and potatoes; every trip to the “toilet” warranted courage and BYO toilet paper; snails crawled up the walls of the dark concrete box with a tap that was our “shower”; a buffalo lived outside our window, and a faint smell of shit permeated the air wherever we walked.
And yet, after three days of life in Chitwan, we stopped thinking about these inconveniences of everyday life, and started to notice the remarkable community that we found ourselves in - the idyllic rice paddocks that surrounded our host family on all sides, the croaking of frogs at night, the well-loved stray dogs that came and went whenever they pleased, the women who harvested rice at dawn and dusk.
Every day, school children, neatly dressed in their school uniforms, bid us good day as they cycled past on their bikes - the girls with white ribbons in their braids, and the boys with stiff collars and straight ties, their heads bobbing up over the rice fields as they make their way to school every morning. The children at the orphanage were so hard-working and well-behaved they put memories of myself at their age to shame.
No. I didn’t change the world. I didn’t leave a mark on these people’s lives. But I’m beginning to think that perhaps it isn’t about any of that. It’s about opening yourself to be changed, about allowing others to leave a mark on you.
It’s about understanding that as a tourist, sometimes the best thing you can do for a community is to tread lightly, to open your heart and mind, and ultimately to pass through, leaving with nothing but a different perspective of the world.
Our bedroom at the host family
The orphanage
