2An article in The Onion mocks voluntourism, joking that a half dozen-day visit to a rural African hamlet can "completely change a woman'due south facebook profile picture."  The commodity quotes "22-year sometime Angela Fisher" who says:

I don't call up my profile photo volition always be the same, not after the experience of taking such incredible pictures with my arms around those small African children'south shoulders.

Information technology goes on to say that Fisher "has been encouraging every one of her friends to visit Africa, promising that information technology would alter their Facebook profile photos every bit well."

I was one time Angela Fisher. Only I'k not any more.

***

I have participated in not one but iii divide, and increasingly disillusioning, international health brigades, short-term visits to developing countries that involve bringing health intendance to struggling populations.

Such trips – critically called voluntourism — are a booming business, even though they do very little advertising and charge people thousands of dollars to participate.

How do they attract so many paying volunteers?

Photography is a large role of the answer.  Voluntourism organizations don't have to advertise, considering they can crowdsource.  Photography – peculiarly the habit of taking and posting selfies with local children – is a central component of the voluntourism experience. Hashtags like #InstagrammingAfrica are popular with students on international health brigades, as are #medicalbrigades, #globalhealth, and of grade the nostalgic-for-the-good-days hashtag #takemeback.

Information technology was the photographs posted by other students that inspired me to proceed my showtime overseas medical mission. When classmates uploaded the experience of themselves wearing scrubs abreast ambrosial children in developing countries, I believed I was missing out on a pivotal pre-med feel. I took over 200 photos on my first international volunteer mission. I modeled those I had seen on Facebook and even premeditated photo opportunities to acquire the "perfect" image that would receive the virtually "likes."

Over time, I felt increasingly uncomfortable with the ethics of those photographs, and ultimately left my photographic camera at home. Now, as an insider, I see iii mutual types of photographs voluntourists share through social media: The Suffering Other, The Self-Directed Samaritan, and The Overseas Selfie.

The Suffering Other

In a photograph taken past a swain voluntourist in Republic of ghana (not shown), a child stands isolated with her bare feet digging in the clay. Her hands pull upwardly her shirt to betrayal an umbilical hernia, distended belly, and a pair of besides-large underwear. Her face is uncertain and her scalp shows testify of dermatological pathology or a nutritional deficiency—peradventure both. Behind her, simply weeds grow.

Anthropologists Arthur and Joan Kleinman note that images of distant, suffering women and children suggest there are communities incapable of or uninterested in caring for its own people. These photographs justify colonialist, paternalistic attitudes and policies, suggesting that the individual in the photograph…

…must exist protected, as well as represented, by others. The image of the subaltern conjures up an almost neocolonial credo of failure, inadequacy, passivity, fatalism, and inevitability. Something must exist done, and information technology must be done soon, simply from outside the local setting. The authorization of action through an appeal for strange aid, even foreign intervention, begins with an evocation of indigenous absence, an erasure of local voices and acts.

The Self-directed Samaritan

Here we take a grin young white daughter with a French braid, medical scrubs, and a well-intentioned smile. This young lady is the centerpiece of the photo; she is its protagonist. Her scrubs suggest that she is doing important work among those who are so poor, so vulnerable, and and so Other.

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The girl is me. And the photograph was taken on my kickoff trip to Republic of ghana during a ten day medical brigade. I'm beaming in the photograph, half towering and one-half hovering over these children. I do not know their names, they do not know my name, simply I directed a friend to capture this moment with my ain camera. Why?

This photograph is less near doing actual work and more about retrospectively appearing to take had a positive impact overseas. Photographs similar these represent the overseas experience in accordance with what writer Teju Cole calls the "White Savior Industrial Complex."

Moreover, in directing, capturing, and performing in photos such as these, voluntourists prevent themselves from really engaging with the others in the photo. In On Photography , Susan Sontag reminds the states:

Photography has go almost as widely skillful an entertainment as sex and dancing – which means that…it is mainly a social rite, a defense force confronting anxiety, and a tool of power.

On these trips, nosotros hibernate behind the lens, consuming the world around us with our powerful gazes and the clicking of camera shutters. When I directed this photo opportunity and starred in information technology, I used my privilege to capture a photograph that made me feel equally though I was engaging with the community. Merely now do I realize that what I was actually doing was making myself the hero/star in a story almost "suffering Africa."

The Overseas Selfie


[Photo removed in response to a request from Global Brigades.]

In his New York Times Op-Ed, that modern champion of the selfie James Franco wrote:

Selfies are avatars: Mini-Me's that we send out to requite others a sense of who nosotros are … In our age of social networking, the selfie is the new fashion to await someone right in the center and say, "Hello, this is me."

Although related to the Self-Directed Samaritan shot, there's something actress-insidious about this type of super-shut range photograph. "Hi, this is me" takes on new meaning – there is only one subject in this photograph, the white bailiwick. Capturing this image and posting it on the internet is to empathize the Other not as a separate person who exists in the context of their own family or community but rather, as a prop, an actress, someone merely intelligible in relation to the Western volunteer.

***

Voluntourism is ultimately about the fulfillment of the volunteers themselves, not necessarily what they bring to the communities they visit. In fact, medical volunteerism oft breaks down existing local health systems. In Republic of ghana, I realized that that local people weren't purchasing health insurance, since they knew in that location would be costless foreign health care and medications available every few months. This left them vulnerable in the intervening times, not to mention when the arrangement would exit the customs.

In the end, the Africa nosotros voluntourists photograph isn't a real place at all. It is an imaginary geography whose landscapes are forged by colonialism, equally well equally a good deal of narcissism. I hope my swain students retrieve critically nigh what they are doing and why earlier they sign upward for a curt-term global volunteer experience. And if they do go, it is my promise that they might think with some caste of narrative humility about how to de-center themselves from the Western savior narrative. Virtually importantly, I promise they leave their iphones at dwelling.

Cross-posted at Pacific Standard and at Mondiaal Nieuws in Dutch.

Lauren Kascak is a graduate of the Masters Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University, where Sayantani DasGupta is a faculty member.  DasGupta is the editor of Stories of Illness and Healing  and the author of The Demon Slayers and Other Stories  and Her Own Medicine .