News

My inbox is filled with them - charming, funny and sweetly idealistic missives from university-age kids who have gone global with their desire to do good.

Let me see, they're teaching drama to children in the Dominican Republic, testing clinical samples in HIV labs in Ghana, saving monkeys in Thailand and planting trees in Sri Lanka.

They're finding out how most of the rest of the world lives - or tries to - getting culture shock big time (not to mention malaria) and dutifully writing informative e-mails back to mom and dad, who then proudly distribute them to much of their address book under the heading, "Guess what Jonah's doing!"

But here's the truth: Many of these kids are "voluntouring" on mom and dad's buck. Some parents are spending upward of $3,000 to "help" their kids have an authentic Peace Corps-style experience - for as little as two or three weeks but sometimes up to two months - in developing countries before they go off on safari or to a beach.

Is there anything wrong with this?

I've heard rumblings from both kids and parents about the blatantly elitist aspects of this voluntourism: "If I see one more photo of an upper-middle-class white kid holding an African orphan ...," muttered one cocktail party cynic, who, when I told her my daughter was going off to Northern Ontario to work on an aboriginal reserve, quipped, "And don't you just feel wonderful being able to say that."

Her point - before I set her straight that my daughter's job was a paying one for which she had been screened - was that boomer parents are dizzy with delight that their kids are off "saving the world." They eagerly slip it into conversation, conveniently forgetting that without their financial help, their kids would be like all the others, slinging burgers at McDonald's or working as a lifeguard to stockpile funds for school.

Let's face it, less-affluent kids simply can't afford to have that global do-gooding experience, let alone drop it strategically onto their résumés for key impact in grad school or job applications.

But there's another side to it. These trips, organized by student volunteer agencies across North America and in Europe, are filled with the potential to not only offer helping hands in needy communities, but to change a young person's direction in life.

At their most emotionally porous, open-hearted and idealistic, university students may well discover their calling abroad, or even develop a much-needed global vision. So if there was ever a time to, say, plop them in an HIV clinic in Kumasi, it's now.

When I asked around, I found that many kids had saved the money themselves for their overseas adventures (though parents may have contributed as a last minute "I'm so proud of you" gesture).

Some of them were not even taking full advantage of the opportunity to continue travelling. My friend's daughter, Jessica, flew to Tanzania to work in an orphanage and do a quick safari, all in two weeks before returning to a paying job.

Jessica, 23, a graduate of McMaster University in Hamilton, found that most of the volunteers at the orphanage were "white upper-middle-class kids" who nonetheless brought, she thought, "a sense of family" to the orphanage.

She also discovered what all foreign aid workers realize with an overwhelming inner sigh: "There's so much to be done."

You want to make a difference, Jessica told me, but at times "you feel like a spectator - and a spectacle." So she muddled her way through cultural misunderstandings: "We decided to paint the orphanage fence white, complete with handprints from the kids" - a charming idea but villagers wondered why they weren't paying the locals to paint the fence.

With her job and further schooling, she doubts she will have the time to return. But back in Toronto, she's already helped raise funds to send a Tanzanian man to teacher's college.

Of course, the declining North American economy may mean that even wealthy parents will not be so keen to finance their kids' overseas altruism. The director of one California-based agency told me that, already, some volunteering programs "are at a standstill."

He conceded that it's "a fairly glamorous" proposition for privileged kids to help out in some previously unheard of corners of the world. Yet there's the hope, he says, "they will come back home and continue to make a difference here."

I guess it depends on what you would rather your kid be doing - working a banal summer job and hitting the clubs on a soft summer night, or helping out in a small village in Ghana, perhaps discovering in the process that taking a bucket shower is just as good as wallowing in the luxury steam shower at home. And whether you can afford to help subsidize that realization.

My money says that, at the very least, voluntourism can't hurt. And who knows? It may well help change the world, one privileged kid at a time.