The aesthetics and commodification of destination volunteering

Critique of Destination-Volunteering

Destination-volunteering often preserves expat comfort, accelerates gentrification, and avoids complex local needs. This is my critique of destination-volunteer culture, centred around Nosara as a main example. 

When there is a high rate of expats that come to live and volunteer here, I think we have to consider what benefit this actually has to the community when those efforts don’t seem to correlate in any obvious way to the improvement of the living experience of locals, and rather seems to do the opposite: intensifying gentrification, wealth polarization and discontentment. Volunteering is altruistic, so it must always be a good and morally safe and correct activity in theory. I want to explore the motives and nature of those activities to better understand where the goals of altruism break down, when those activities are done in the context of privilege.

In the next example, the purpose is not to attack individuals for imperfect or incomplete moral understanding, but to think critically about the differences between flavours of altruism and explore the psychological processes behind different moral activities.

I have these two friends that I know that are quite similar because they really love animals. One friend got a dog a few years ago and unfortunately her dog had some health problems and it was very hard for her. I reached out to her during this time and we both cried about it, and I was very, very moved by how much she loved this animal and what a deep connection she had. the thing about her is that it’s not really specifically about the animal it’s just that the animal is pure enough to hold all the generosity and the love she has because she’s such a compassionate person. She’s probably the only person in the world that ever told me that my poetry is good and I should keep going. Even when I first met her she was consoling a friend who had just gone through a breakup. So this is a woman that’s just constantly really caring about people and connecting with them. It’s easy to find who is doing the real work of caring because caring is something that breaks your heart. 

The other friend, I really admired for a long time from a distance and when I actually found out who she was and was introduced to her she immediately was very very friendly. She said hello to me at a cafe and was excited that we met, we chatted about dancing and she watched and liked all my posts and stories. Within the week she asked me to adopt some kittens for her animal shelter, and then after that never spoke to me again. 

In the second instance, it felt transactional. I felt used in my willingness to be open to making friendships. The definition of trauma is that which discourages us from pursuing meaning in relationships, and I felt the rupture in that moment for my pursuit of a connection where I would be seen and acknowledged for my value as a person worth knowing and not a resource for a ‘higher’ moral agenda.

This begs the question if she is acting from a place of wholeness and integrity to her connection to the community of life, or is somewhat skewed in her pursuit of a goal, helping one sector (fostering animals) while oblivious to the possible detriment of the social fabric around which the animal shelter operates in. This is not to blame the individual with the full weight of this social critique. There is always an element of personal responsibility but that type of critique would have no impact if we didn’t also acknowledge the factors surrounding her. Likely she is acting from positive reinforcement from her immediate social circle that enforces this blindness to the local community. It is easy to imagine how capitalism shapes the standards of those values: how statistics of ‘how many pets got adopted today’ and social media engagement etc. override the immeasurable quality of embodied connection. 

A critique about the scope of nature conservation, even though I do participate from garbage pickup time to time, is that I believe the majority of the environmental conservation should be done by the locals, because they are afforded the time and energy and education to do so. I believe in the best case foreigners should support the locals to support the natural environment, through helping local farmers over corporate farms etc. This fosters confidence in ownership and stewardship over their own lands, instead of feeling like they are irresponsible teenagers who can’t be trusted to clean their own room. An analogy, I learned when working with disabled children that the biggest impact you can have on a child’s future is not in supporting them directly but in supporting the parents (emotionally and with resources and time). Taking over environmental conservation responsibilities from the locals is just another extension of taking the land through commercial purchases, the message is the same: this is not your land. You can see how animal and nature conservation, from this line of reasoning, becomes moral justification for continued foreign dominance. Volunteer culture doesn’t cause gentrification, but it aestheticizes it—making extraction feel virtuous while the costs stay local. The question I’m asking is, why do we have forms of volunteerism that don’t directly involve locals as part of its reason-for-being, and if so, who is the recipient of that generosity? Why do we come to ‘help’ and then ignore the entire community of people who actually live there?

My experience living there, making friends with various expats and volunteers that are individually good and outgoing people, is that whenever I talk about actual problems, rarely does anyone allow me to continue that conversation. First, let me explain to you how I arrived at my investment in these problems. I never came here with the intention of being the problem solver, but my interest comes from a compounded daily experience of physically living there and interacting at the grocery store or other mundane activities. Besides the obvious visual poverty, when people are haggling you for money, you know it’s because they have problems with it, and knowing there are problems around you should make most people feel sad. So the accumulation of those emotional experiences living in that place makes me sad which makes me want to fix the problem because I am sad. This is the way a healthy community is supposed to operate. You can’t stop feeling what’s real, that is impossible. It’s healthy to feel sad when you see suffering, that’s not a sign of weakness that the spirituality healthy and wellness industry wants to believe it is. There’s no amount of yoga or ayahuasca ceremonies that will improve how depressed I feel about poverty and violence.  

This is a really common pattern in destination communities that attract well-intentioned foreigners. Places like Nosara are built to sell connection as a commodity itself. So they’re selling connection to nature, connection to spirituality, and connection to simplicity, but as a commodity. And so what you get is people taking up activities that feel emotionally safe and morally uncomplicated, like cleaning the beach and planting trees and saving animals. They live there for decades and never venture from that formula. It’s actually giving this illusion that they’re doing good because the work is about charity when it should really be about accountability. It should be about stepping into something morally complicated that makes you feel broken because it’s changing who you believe you are. You can’t sell connection and charity as an experience. It’s not a passive thing. It’s something that eats you alive. And almost kills you and demands that you live in equality with every other person in the world. How am I supposed to explore a place where feminism is so underdeveloped and not live through that same experience, to understand what the actual problem is, to understand what it feels like to be a woman in that specific dynamic of a partnership or marriage, even more so because there is clearly a story there that has never been spoken out loud. 

The volunteer activity that I choose to do consistently is teaching English to children. On the surface this seems like a safe volunteer activity on par with tree planting and pet fostering. There is no volunteer, teaching or Spanish experience required and therefore no barriers to entry. Yet we get absolutely no volunteers, possibly one a year, almost no funding, and no interest from the large community of expats here.

I think that furthers my thesis that the problem is the unwillingness to step out of a comfortable social circle and not integrate to the local community in any meaningful way, meaningful being a relation of giving back, and not just receiving.

When I see the community rewarding certain forms of volunteer work over others, it makes me realize that the moral standard of what makes you a ‘good person’ is arbitrary and not measured at all by the actual impact on the entire community, one that includes locals, and in fact there is no measurement coming from locals and no input from the locals on what volunteer activities foreigners take part in one their land.

Any activity we take part in that does not place local people first, is not simply neutral, but a vote to deprioritize them, and a silent act of psychic violence. It puts the foreign interests before locals by default because it implies that the foreigner does not feel the need to justify their presence on their land. You wouldn’t go to someone’s dinner party without a present, that is not a neutral presence. You are eating free food. 

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The problem with performing goodness, or labelling it as aspirational is that you push it up to a standard when it should be the bare minimum. You don’t want to fix problems but you have to because it hurts. You’re not trying to save the world, you are travelling through it without pretending.

This is the only reason to travel: to understand and how other people live. To find out in what ways you are really the same. And I think that’s the real difference between travelers and vacationers. And even though the world has become so globalized, and we have a lot of people who visit other countries, but the number of real travellers are very very few.

I remember seeing a group of women at the beach doing a spiritual group retreat. They were applauding the sun for going down. I hope that when they speak to their server at the restaurant they won’t use that loud “speaking-at-you” tone I see tourists do when they mask how nervous they feel around people from other cultures. I hope they know that mastering that interaction will do more to heal their soul and that, unlike their retreat, it will not cost anything.