It’s been 8 months since I’ve been home from South Africa and since it’s my senior year, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my future. Where I want to be, what I want to be doing, and how I want to be doing it. When all of my friends were getting asked back to work for companies that they interned for the previous summer or going through recruiting for business and engineering companies, I was just trying to figure out what it is that I actually want to do with my life. 

 

This year, I’ve become skeptical of the work that I thought I would want to be doing for the rest of my life. In the communities that I’ve been a part of, community service and traveling abroad is understood as something that is inherently good. There have been a few conversations that I’ve had about how to be effective and things to NOT do when engaging with social justice work. People around me know not to post Instagram pictures with little black children on their Instagrams, but that’s about it. They still talk about how honored they are to have volunteered in a village for three weeks or how much fun they had building homes for hurricane repair. I’m not saying that I don’t think these people are in the wrong for participating in these opportunities, but I do think that there are a lot of consequences about that work that we aren’t considering at any stage in the process.

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To be quite honest, there are parts of my summer experience that I absolutely loved and things that I wouldn’t change. This was my second time traveling out of North America and I am so glad that I chose to go to South Africa. It’s a beautiful country full of genuine people, experiences, and cultures. I met people from across the world whom I would now consider some of my closest friends. They’ve helped me create many of my fondest memories from my life so far. For work, I got to know and bond with 25 inspiring, silly, and loving girls who pushed me to do my best work and be the best person I can be. I became more informed around issues that they face in their day to day lives and learned from them what it means to be a young girl in Cape Town. I learned so much about myself and the people and places around me. For that, I am eternally grateful. 

 

The problem is, though, that it’s 8 months later and things about my summer experience still don’t sit right with me. Besides a few WhatsApp and Facebook Messages exchanged here and there, I haven’t spoken to the girls at the home. I’ve seen updates on social media but none about their personal lives, which I ended up becoming invested in by the time my internship was over. I don’t know if the organization actually ended up using the writing and female empowerment programs that I created for them to use once I was gone. I don’t know whether they still talk about me or use the journaling techniques that I taught them to use when they were feeling stressed. I don’t even know which of the girls are still at the home and which ones have left, gone home, transferred to a different home. Was what I did enough? How could I have done better?

 

If I were to go back in time, I think I would still go through with this experience. I’m not sure if that’s a selfish thing to say. Of course, there are things that I would have done differently and things I would have considered now that I've done a great deal of thinking about the issue. It’s important to understand that just because issues don’t happen here, in the places that we’re from, means that we have the ability and resources to solve them. Right. We know that we can’t solve giant issues on our own, in two months of a study abroad or a week-long mission trip or even a two-year-long service corps program. What we can do is a little bit of good, right?

 

My answer to this is “yes, but...”. To me, it feels like a little good can actually be interfering with a greater good or a greater issue. There was good in me spending time with the girls every day after school. I helped make it so that they were less lonely and had more immediate support, but only for two months. I helped them write resumes, but didn’t help them find a job. I came, I saw, I did, and I left. What about that is helping them and their community in the long-run? Just doing what we want to do for the amount of time that seems feasible to accomplish what we think is best is simply not enough. 

 

The problem is, I’m not sure what is. 

But I do think that our desire to do good prohibits us from doing better.

 

I think that oftentimes, we fail to consider the long term effects of our work. If we volunteer in a village to play with children, think about what we can do to support them once we’re gone. Talk with the communities that we’re working with and learn directly from them what it is that they need and how it is we can support them. Chances are, if you can afford to fly somewhere and donate your time, then you have the resources to continue supporting wherever you are in one way or another once you’re gone, whether that’s monetarily or providing them with resources or some other form of staying connected. This feels even more important for longer-term engagements such as Teach For America, the Peace Corps, or non-profit work - if you want to dedicate your life to providing for the greater good, then you probably should know this, but maybe you don’t. 

 

Each role and each opportunity should be fully examined before we fully hop on board. Unless there is an issue staring us right in the eyes, we tend to trust ourselves and our partner organizations in that the service they’re offering is the best that it can be right off the bat. I would encourage those who are pursuing these types of opportunities to challenge the norm by asking questions and being skeptical. Not doing this has great potential to lead to unfulfilling and unproductive work that can create a lot of consequences both in the targeted community at hand and makes you complicit in letting other volunteers continue this practice in the future. 

 

Finally, it’s important that we acknowledge that we are a part of the problem, even though we might not feel like it. We have to question the structures that are currently in place, especially if for those of us who decide to dedicate our entire lives towards doing good. It just makes sense to put a concept into question now that we know that it is outdated and somewhat harmful. Even if it isn’t apparent, we have to consider how our personal motives and what we want to accomplish could potentially get in the way of reaching the greater goal for the communities at hand. Sometimes, service work can be selfish - let’s make sure that in the future, it isn’t. 

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