December 13, 2001 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Global Volunteers sends 2,000 Americans a year on public-service missions to impoverished countries, but based on one volunteer’s experience renovating a community center in Hagley Gap, Jamaica, “it’s hard to tell who’s helping whom,” reports Mother Jones (December).
Bud Philbrook, a Minnesota state legislator, and his wife, a publicist named Michelle Gran, founded Global Volunteers in 1980 after spending their honeymoon building an irrigation system in Guatemala. The group sends American volunteers to work on projects of local choosing, where work is shared equally between the volunteers and the local residents.
Before the 1980s, volunteer vacations often took the form of work camps and remained marginal. Bill McMillon, author of Volunteer Vacations, told Mother Jones that such vacationers were usually “affiliates of Students for a Democratic Society.”
Global Volunteers has succeeded in making these vacations more mainstream, in part, the magazine reports, by adding more amenities. Though the Global Volunteers trips cost more — $500 to $2,400, depending on the length and location of the trip, compared with $300 for a two-week work camp — they can be quite fun, if frustrating to those who actually want to see results.
The writer-volunteer, Bill Donahue, notes how the village’s community leaders never showed up. Work did not begin until four days after the team arrived, and only then because the unpaid tour guide procured supplies by hitching a ride on a truck to Kingston. In the meantime, the volunteers went swimming, took naps, ate tasty Jamaican food, and visited a marijuana field where they sampled the crop.
But even given the challenges the volunteers faced, the Jamaican villagers still seemed grateful for their help. “They haven’t made poverty disappear,” the native tour guide Oswell Battieste told Mother Jones, “but at least there are monuments of their work.”
